NextReports: Efficiency Meter

NextReports formatting conditions can be used to highlight some data by changing background, foreground, font and border properties.

A very useful application is to generate something like an "Efficiency Meter" or any kind of "Meter". Such meter will show how some entities are found regarding some thresholds.

Let's take as an example of our "Efficiency Meter" a call center where different employees are talking with different clients. We set some thresholds for the number of phones per employee to know how they perform.

A sample report may show employee name, the number of phones taken for a period of time (in our example 11 hours), the number of clients involved and the average of calls for a period of time (in  our example 1 hour).

To define our efficiency meter we have to select different colors for our thresholds. For this we use formatting conditions. In our case, $E{Average} field has the following:

Result shows us in a nice format how everyone performed and it allows us to see in a glimpse if there are ups and downs.

NextReports Server: External Drill Down

From version 5.4 NextReports Server will define a new type of drill down. This can be any external url. Just add a new drill down like:

You can use the clicked value with a tag called ${value}.

Also, depending on last entity selected, you may be asked or not to select the column index used by table reports. If you have a table report as last drill before to add a url drill, this column will be shown, otherwise it won’t.

After adding a url drill down, no other drill can be added to that entity.