tmccormi wrote on Thursday, April 30, 2009:
This is a similar topic to the common printing model, but is specific to reports. The current Reports menu a mess. It’s getting closer to being standard, but it’s not there yet and would be pretty easy to improve. here are my thoughts…
Basic Guide Lines for Reports:
1) Reports should be READ ONLY (no batch processing hidden as a option on a report, use a separate menu area for that or different link)
2) The menu should have a clear description of each report in sentence form. Some are obvious, but new users are easily confused
3) All reports should have an export to CVS option
4) All reports should follow the basic printing model
5) All on screen reports should have paging control including NONE as a user option.
6) All reports should have a ‘save’ option. There are plenty of times you want to compare this month to last month or similar and date ranges are not reliable when you can back post information. The export to CVS might be a stop gap, but not all users will want to mess with another layer.
7) The SQL bookmarks that show up as user defined reports should have user comments/descriptions available and follow the same guidelines as above. (PS: I love that tool!)
Side note on the SQL bookmark thing: We should extend that to work like the contributed forms plugin so more complex php reports can be developed and show up on the menu.
Tony