Reporting

Reports. Numbers. Charts. It’s important to be able see your data to make business decisions, and even more importantly, seeing it in a way that makes sense to you.

Reports within onCourse

Our reporting engine: powered by JasperReports

In onCourse, we’ve chosen a powerful, flexible reporting engine called JasperReports to create our reports. We and our customers can create report templates are used to generate print quality output PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV and XML that fits their needs.

There exist a number of tools that can be used to create and custom reports which we’ll go through in a step by step fashion in the following sections of this document. Our tool of choice is called iReport, but it’s stilll possible to create reports such as OpenOffice or MS Office but these solutions will not be able to generate reports that can be imported as a report within onCourse itself.

Reports included in onCourse

You’ll find that a number of reports have already been included in onCourse. For the most part these will provide information about one thing, ie. from the Students window, you’ll be able to print a list of students, or if you wished student details. Similarly from the Courses, you can print course details, profit and loss statements, the schedules and timetables of a list of Courses or a particular Course.

However, often people want to find out more information than the basics. Often all the bits of information that you want can’t simply found within the one item. Say for example: if you wanted to find all students who had enrolled in Course called “Human Philosophy” over the past 5 years, you simply can’t do this within the standard reports.

This is why we’ve included a mechanism for people to create custom reports, and import the reports that they’ve created into onCourse, allowing reports to be printed when required. Thus we hope that people will be able to generate reports that meets their needs and requirements.

You can view the full list of reports grouped by type and function here.

Importing a custom report

It’s simple to add a report that’s already been created. Simply navigate to General Preferences. Click on the Printing Tab and then click on “+”.

Importing a custom report: General Preferences -> Printing Tab

You should then be able to select your report (.jrxml or .jasper extensions). Hit the “Select” button after highlighting the file you want.

Importing a custom report: Selecting a report to import

If after your import that you find that you have problems with printing of that report, you may need to go to Resource->Reports to compile the report if it does not work

Creating Reports with OpenOffice

Guide to accessing reports/data from OpenOffice here