Reports

A report in sanda is a canvas of blocks: headline numbers, charts, tables and written analysis, laid out on a page and built on your semantic fluid. You draw a box and pick a metric, or you ask cherry to build the whole pack, and the report keeps itself current because it never stores the numbers.

What a report is made of

Every block on a report stores a question, not an answer: which metric, broken down by which dimension, under which conditions. When someone opens the report, sanda asks each question again through the same definitions that answer a question in cherry chat or the SQL workbench. The figure in a report, the figure in a chat answer and the figure in an emailed copy agree because they come from one place.

That has three consequences worth knowing early:

• A report is never stale. Numbers are read from your warehouse each time the report is opened, printed, shared or emailed. Only the written analysis can go out of date, and on the canvas its block says when it was written.
• A definition change reaches every report. Fix net revenue once in the semantic fluid and every block that uses it changes with it.
• Nothing on the canvas can be typed over. A cell holds what the warehouse said. A column of your own is a formula, never a number you overwrote.

connections → sanda warehouse → semantic fluid → blocks on a canvas
                                                     │
        ┌───────────────┬───────────────────────────┼──────────────────────┐
     the console     a shared link            an email on a schedule     the reports portal
   (your team)    (anyone you send it to)   (PDF and PNG attached)    (readers you invite)

Who reads a report

A report can reach five kinds of reader, and each is a different promise about who sees what.

The console is for the people who build reports. Link visitors and email recipients need no account at all, and readers have a seat on the portal and nothing else.

The Reports page

Open the console and go to Activate · Reports. The page has two tabs, Reports and Portal, and a Report schedules button at the top right.

The Reports tab is your list:

• New canvas opens a short form. Give the report a Name and, under What should it contain?, describe it in plain language. Press Create and let cherry build it to have cherry lay out the whole pack from that description, or Create blank canvas to start empty. Either way the description stays with the report as its brief.
• Your reports lists every report you can open, with its description, how many blocks it has, how many live schedules it has, and when it was created. Small tags mark a report that is narrower than the workspace (private, shared with you, or a count such as 2 shared) and any report that a public link can open (1 link).
• The copy icon duplicates a report and the bin icon deletes it. Deleting removes the report's blocks and its history, and cannot be undone. A read-only member does not see the copy icon, because a copy is a new report.
• Templates appears once you have saved one. A template is a canvas saved to be copied, and new report from this (not shown to a read-only member) makes a report from it. See the report canvas.

Report names are unique in a workspace. Creating or renaming a report to a name that exists is refused.

The Portal tab is where an owner or admin looks after the reports portal. See The reports portal.

Who can do what

A member with the read-only role can open reports and ask questions, and changes nothing. A reader has no console at all: they use the reports portal.

Where to go next