Watch our video in order to learn how to create custom reports in ABBYY FlexiCapture and expand on the data the is already included within the software.
Hello. Today I’m going to show you how we create a custom report within ABBYY FlexiCapture. Now this is a pretty cool concept because it gives us the ability to expand on the data that is already included in the system, especially when we’re dealing with statistics like batch user document verification type of statistics. So what we’re going to do is create a brand new report and the way that we do that is we open up a report server project within visual studio. Now to save us some time on the video, I’ve already done that, but typically you would just do file, new project and you can just start typing in report and typically we just start with a report server project and empty one. If you do not see this option here in your visual studio, I would recommend that you look and download SQL servers data tools.
So sometimes it’s called SSDT. You can just Google that and download it. It’ll just add this add on to visual studio for you. But once you’re within the report server project, which I have here behind the scenes, you can simply design your report. Now, I’m not going to explain to you in this video how to create a report from scratch. We will assume that you have some skills with creating your own report, but obviously you can find all kinds of resources online for how to customize, create and develop your own report. But what I’ve done, just to summarize is I’ve created a report that will show us by document type some statistics. And just to kind of give you a quick summary, we created a data set and we created a data source, the data sources of course, my database. Then you would establish your own data sources as well.
And then you would point a data set at a data source. It is very important that you call this Dataset, that name that you see on the screen. ABBYY FlexiCapture, when we deploy this, is expecting to see this name for the Dataset. Now you can point this Dataset at anything you’d like and including a stored procedure, which I did, but you will definitely want to make sure that that name is correct and that the information is accessible from an ABBYY FlexiCapture database. For example, mine’s calling the stored procedure, which is one that’s comes out of the box. Within the software. We can of course test it and then once we’ve tested it, we can now deploy it. Now it’s very important that we talk about some project settings before we deploy it. When we deploy it, we need to have some specific properties set up and you can see most importantly is this target version down here. Currently in FlexiCapture version 12, you will need to make sure that you have this second option selected. After you selected it, you can right click and go to build and what that will do, is it will put a directory called the “Bin Directory” under the project so that you can access the version of this file and I’ll show that to you. And here, since I’ve built the project, I have a debugging folder and there’s a copy of the report that I’m creating and deploying. Now what I will do is I will copy that into a special directory that ABBYY has told us to deploy custom reports to, and here you can see where it’s at. It’s typically in the FlexiCapture website. You may have years deployed at a different location, mine’s simply on the C drive and if we dive into the custom reports section, we will see that here. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy over our report and it’s going to show us that there. Now if I refresh the screen, you not not see a difference and the reason why that is is because every report must have a XML file that goes along with it. I’ve actually already had one. I will show it to you. I’m going to copy mine in and when I copy that in you’ll see now I have a new report that’s available to us. Just to show you some settings here.
You can see that we can name the report, we need to tell that it’s a data set report, we give it a file name. And then we also have some information here about the stored procedure, if we’re using a stored procedure. We can also put plain SQL as well. And then we have information about the parameters. So that’s what we’re showing here. And what I’m going to do is now go back to our site and when I Click on the custom report that I just deployed, you will see now a list of those parameters and also some information about the report itself. Those parameters are coming from this XML. ABBYY’s help documentation lists a lot of information here that is important for you to understand about parameters and default values, but I’ll trust that you know how to access that. At this point we now have a custom report deployed and I can run some data.
Actually I’m going to move this back quite a bit and then you can see now when I hit show report, the software will now load up that custom report for us. It’s very cool because now I have the ability to report on any information that is located within that FlexiCapture database that is accessible to us and now managers or end users, or team leads, have access to that data through critical reports and I can make those designed with all kinds of styling and and all those sorts of cool things that we want. Also, I can have them exportable to Excel, PDF or Word, and therefore managers have access to this information as well. So customer reports is a great way to expand on the data that is within the software. The software also does come with some out of the box reports, whether we’re talking about site performance, processing performance, or maybe even users and end user performance. We call them operators. But once again, all of your reports are accessible through via the administration of monitoring console. So I hope this has shown you a glimpse into how to create a custom report. This is a very cool process and look forward to helping out if we can help you in any way. Have a good day.