Reporting on Reports in Workfront
An active Workfront instance can quickly develop hundreds if not thousands of reports. Like everything else these need to be managed. Luckily you can report on reports and this has become a favorite in by Workfront Toolbelt.
Use Case 1: Departure of a System Admin
Many reports might be set to Run As User -> SuperUser and will generate errors once if this account is deactivated.
To fix these reports, I created a report on reports and set the filter as Run As User > Name Contains SuperUserName (if she was active or I had the ID handy I could use the ID instead)
This gave me a list of all of the effected reports. One day this might be bulk editable or in-line editable but this time I corrected them by hand from this list.
Use Case 2: Grant Manage Rights to All Reports on a Dashboard
Currently only view access is inherited from the Dashboard (Portal Tab in text mode). To assign a user or team manage rights to all of these reports you might right click on each report to open in a new tab and then share each report separately.
Or you can create a report and there is a filter for Linked Portal Tabs ID and you can set this equal to the dashboard.
Now you can highlight all of the reports and share in one action. You can also use the report or dashboard name contains to do many more at once.
Use Case 3: Consolidating Fields
You want to see where a specific field is used in reporting when you are going to delete or modify that field.
Unfortunately you can't directly filter on fields used in a report. What you can do is create an unfiltered report and report on the defintions of filters, grouping and views.
With this information you can show as many reports as possible on one page and then use the browsers find command (Ctrl+f on windows) to find your field name.
Use Case 4: Finding Examples
You want to find an example of a specific syntax in your report.
If you have your report on report with your defintion columns you can just search for the syntax.
For example FIELD: lets you compare two fields in a filter, so since I've previously used this on a report I can search and find the example:
{actualCost=FIELD:plannedCost, actualCost_Mod=gt}
Which would look like this in text mode
actualCost=FIELD:plannedCost
actualCost_Mod=gt
You can actually convert this back to standard mode
Adding Definition Columns:
Filter Definition, Grouping Definition and View Definition
Filter Definition:
displayname=Filter Definition
textmode=true
valuefield=filter:definition
valueformat=HTML
Grouping Definition:
displayname=Grouping Definition
textmode=true
valuefield=groupBy:definition
valueformat=HTML
View Definition:
displayname=View Definition
textmode=true
valuefield=view:definition
valueformat=HTML
Melinda Layten
mlayten@gmail.com
Independent Workfront Consultant
