PreCanned Reports
Precanned reports is mostly a technical feature explaining how different reports can be made available and work internally.
PreCanned reports are predefined reports show a very specific output and typically do not have as much flexibility as general investigative reports. An example is the report "Products sold this week from supplier ABC". The output of this report is probably tightly controlled and typically offers minimal flexibility to see additional information, however, it is ideal if you wish to send this report to the supplier.
PreCanned reports are equivalent to standard reports in most systems, fixed in purpose, easy to run and with a clear output.
Precanned reports can create output in various formats, html, csv, xlsx, etc. This makes them useful for simple integration tasks where the full Fieldpine API is not required.
Main Links
End User Operation
Management
Internals
Precanned report definitions are centrally deployed from Fieldpine.com to your server.
Reports consist of two parts, the "data" part which is around selecting the data to present, and the "presentation" part which formats and creates the output desired.
The "data" part is defined and controlled externally
The "presentation" part can be influenced by sites themselves, especially for HTML output where you can override all Fieldpine CSS
Advanced Example
This section describes a feature only available to beta testers
You wish to allow supplier ABC to run a report and see sales of products sourced from them for last month. Assume you are happy to have this without security restrictions.
To do this, you will require your Fieldpine server to be reachable from the internet through a Cloudflare tunnel.
- Select the report you wish to use, and get the presentation as you want it, Save this URL, the query path and parameters but not the hostname
- Provide an external CSS file to override styling if required.
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Go into settings, "User Interface Web" and enter a vanity URL:
- Set the Visible URL to be https://MYHOSTNAME/SupplierABC/ProductSales.htm
- Set the Internal Processing URL to the URL copied at step 1 above. If the URL has values such as dates you may need to change these from absolute values to relative dates. eg Instead of "1-Feb-2022" use "Month-1" (start of last month)
- Tick to say "Bypasses security"
- Give the supplier the URL "https://MYHOSTNAME/SupplierABC/ProductSales.htm". Whenever they refer to this URL, it will internally run the report you selected with the parameters. They will not see any of the internal URL actually used.