Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Auto Correct option in Report Studio

I came across this option in the Tools menu of Report Studio and found it really useful.

When you run into validation errors while working on complex reports that involve a lot of data items and query objects, identifying the data item that is causing the error becomes difficult especially if its a complex syntax that is used across the data items. In such cases click on the Auto Correct option under Tools Menu to quickly identify all data items that have errors. This is much easier than going through the validation errors and trying to figure out the data items that have issues. But do not click on the OK button of the dialog box as this would remove the erroneous data items from the report.

Lets say we have a report that displays Product Line, Revenue, Margin, Quantity. Now the requirement is to display the values in the records only if quantity is more than 10000 else the records should display NA. So we include a case statement in all the metrics as "Case when [Sales(query)].[Sales].[Quantity] > 10000 then..". Now lets assume we made a mistake while copy-pasting this expression across the data items.Validating the report would throw the following error:













 From the error, its difficult to make out the data item that caused this error. Lets select Auto Correct option from the Tools menu:

















Though this feature is useful it has some limitations like the dialog box only displays the data item name. So if there are multiple data items across query objects with the same name its difficult to identify the query that has the error.
 

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