Best approach for supporting user parameters in (Workflow) Reports?

Stumped and looking for a best practice recommendation. I have a Reports table with some basic information like Report Name, Report Description, Sort Order, and a Last Triggered Date. This feeds nicely into a Deck view to list the reports with name / description, hooked to a custom Action that sets the value of the corresponding reportโ€™s Last Triggered Date to trigger a Workflow with a โ€œDo Thisโ€ that sends a report.

For one of the reports, my client would like to specify a Start Date so that instead of the report containing all records it only contains records since that date. Iโ€™m struggling with what would be the best way, or even a good way, to support this:

  • Add a new Start Date column to the Reports table? Iโ€™d conditionally hide it on the other reports?
  • Add a new table to contain unique fields (Start Date) for this report, referencing back to the report in question? I wouldnโ€™t know how to tie that new tableโ€™s field as an editable field in the view of the main report record.
  • Change structure so that each report is its own table? I think Iโ€™d lose the Deck view capability?

And actually, as I think about this more, right now users only need to access the Details view to fire the Action to generate the report. Since a Details view canโ€™t have an editable field, I might be even more fundamentally lost than I realized for how to set up something like this. It wouldnโ€™t seem right to make a user navigate into an Edit form just to adjust a report parameter. (Especially if Iโ€™m setting up permissions to prohibit some users from editing the other report fields, but those users would need to run reports with parameters they can adjust.)

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