Last week I talked about how Reporting in eLMS has evolved over the years, leading up to the "introduction" of our Ad-Hoc reporting module. I do think that the Ad-Hoc module is one of the absolute best LMS Management tools out there. As a quick summary from last week, our main reporting tools now consist of:
- Custom designed and pre-compiled reports ("Canned" Reports)
- Full data exporting into Excel
- Ad-Hoc Reporting for custom reporting writing.
And now as promised, lets take a closer look at at Ad-Hoc reporting!
When Ad-Hoc was first launched into the online learning management system it was designed to be very simple; to ease our clients into such a powerful module. We started with a few key fields related to:
- Courses
- Users
- Course Registrations
Additionally we allowed our clients to filter the reports with parameters - essentially filtering by defining the value of a key field, such as saying that the Course Registration date had to be in the month of January. We also allowed the use of multiple parameters, joining each of them through an "And" or an "Or" operator.
Our clients quickly adopted Ad-Hoc as their primary method of reporting. Before they could say "SQL" they were coming up with needs of running reports using more data fields than we initially provided, and parameter strings with complex joins of "And" and "Or".
To address the needs we added all sorts of additional data fields, inclu
ding custom user and course attributes for each client's implementation.
We also added a new "Advanced" mode for parameter creation, giving clients an easy interface to create complex statements with a combination of "And" and "Or" operators.
The interface has also been updated to allow drag-and-drop for both ordering the report fields and adding parameters, and faster Ajax controls have been included as well.
Ad-Hoc has turned into an incredibly powerful reporting engine - yet another module that makes eLMS the Best Learning Management System. And we're not done yet. Future upgrades to Ad-Hoc will include the ability to build graphs, charts and much more!