Pivot Report

A pivot report is one you build by configuring the table rather than drawing it: which variables, under which headings, with which calculation. When you would rather write the page yourself, the other family is the HTML Report.

Four levels

The three panels across the lower half of the screen are not incidental; they are the report’s structure:

Select a report and you see its groups, select a group and you see its subgroups, select a subgroup and you see its variables. Every level carries an order field, and that is what sets the layout of the output.

The report’s fields

Field	Description
Name	The report’s name, up to 100 characters
Description	Description
No	A report number or code
Period	The slice the report covers — see below
Report time	The time the report is produced. Required for every period
Language	The language of the report’s headings and its total and deviation labels
Logo	Whether the company logo is printed on the output

Period

Period	What it needs
Hourly	The time alone
Monthly	A day of the month (1–31)
Minutes	A length in minutes (1–1439)

Calculation types

Each variable cell applies a calculation to the data gathered across the slice:

Min · Max · Avg	Lowest, highest, average
Sum · Count	Total, number of samples
First Value · Last Value	The slice’s first and last reading
Max Difference	The largest difference within the slice
Last First Difference	Last minus first — on a meter, this is consumption
Middle Value · Median Value	The middle and the median reading

A cell can also take a format pattern (0.00, say), a total column computed from a second variable, and a deviation column measured against another cell.

On a meter, Sum is not what you want

With a counter that only rises, Sum adds every reading in the slice and produces a meaningless number. Consumption is Last First Difference: the value at the end of the slice minus the value at the start.

Scheduling, printing and mail

The report has its own schedule, and separate day and time fields for printing and for mail, each of which can be turned on independently.

With mail on, the recipients come from the report’s own Mail To field. That holds when sending from a script too: the call takes no recipient list and uses the one on the report’s definition.

Not everyone gets the same document

A recipient who cannot see the report is not mailed it, and separate documents are produced for recipients with different row access. So the attachment two people receive from one report can differ in content — that is not an inconsistency, it is access control reaching the report as well.

Output formats

A report produces HTML and PDF; the PDF is printed by a headless browser on the server. There is no Excel output — use the export paths to get table data into Excel.

Too long a range is refused

A report whose range multiplied by its period exceeds 50,000 buckets is not produced. Asking for two months at a one-minute period crosses that line — roughly 89,000 buckets — and the request comes back as an error. Widen the period or narrow the range.

A report run by hand is distinguishable from a scheduled one in the output: the document’s heading reads Manual in one case and Automatic in the other.

Related

• HTML Report — the other family, where you write the page
• Script Engine — producing and sending a report from a script