MyWraps report setup

This is the help page for the Setup Report operation in MyWraps where you define a report, its columns, and any appended wraps.

Click on the Setup button in the MyWraps toolbar to initiate the creation of a new report.

If you don’t have this button on the toolbar, you need to ask your ExcelWraps administrator for a user role with the Manage MyWraps permission.

Character restrictions

The entire report setup can be saved as a hyperlink. Many special characters are not allowed in links, or in our internal handling of links, including

# ( ) ~ ? / & + = . %

If you use any of these characters in the wrong place in the report setup, you will get a warning message and the setting cannot be saved.

The Properties tab

On the Properties tab, you define the following:

• You assign a Title to your report, without using any of the forbidden characters described above.
• You set a Description for the report, again without using any special characters.
• You set Max Rows to the highest number of wraps you ever expect to have included in the report (read more about The MaxRows parameter). If a report exceeds the MaxRows limitation, there is usually something wrong with your filters or the data. You should not routinely allow this to default to 500, you should ensure that it is set with a reasonable limit for every report you create. It is there only to help you.
• Set Open Mode to Fast when you want to use the most recently calculated data for each live wrap in the report. This speeds up access considerably. If you need to recalculate every live wrap to include the most recent data then use Automatic (read more about Openmode).
• If Aggregates Only is set to Yes, the individual data for each wrap is not included in the report, usually making the report much shorter. The report will only contain the combined, aggregated rows for all wraps, like totals, averages, max/min values, counts, products, variances, and standard deviations.

The Columns tab

On the Columns tab,

1. Add all the columns you want to include in the report using the “plus” button above the Cancel button. Select the cell name from the dropdown or just start typing the cell name and it will automatically complete it for you. This can save time when the list of cell names is very long.
2. Define the column headers displayed in the report using the right-hand column. You cannot use any of the restricted characters listed above in column headers.
3. Ensure the required data type is assigned in the left-hand pop-up menu.
4. For numeric data types, enter the appropriate format specifier in the right-hand column to say how you want the value to be displayed in the report. For more information, study the Microsoft C# format specifiers. Examples:
   • f1 – fixed, one decimal
   • p1 – percent, one decimal

Override the datatype for a column in the report

When you select the columns for a report, you can accept the original data type for a cell or select a different one. There are several uses for this:

• A unit number can be a text value (string) ”800104” or as a number (integer) 800104. You should select the data type that best describes how you want to handle the unit number. If you define it as an integer, it is reasonable to use the aggregate function MAX to determine the maximum unit number in the column. This cannot be done if you keep the original “string” data type.
• The datatype can also be used to select what value to be extracted from a cell holding multiple values. E.g. sig-datetime extracts the date and time for a signature cell whereas sig-date just extracts the date. sig-lastname returns the last name of the signee as a text string.

Make each row link to its source wrap

In some reports, it is useful to include a link to the source wrap from its row in the report. This enables a user to “zoom” directly from a row in the report to the wrap detail just by clicking on the provided link.

This is particularly useful when showing MyWraps reports inside wraps using the ShowTable function to display results from a MyWraps2 function call.

To do this, you just add a column with the system-generated column WrapUrl.

When the link is requested, it appears in a separate column in the MyWraps report, visible to the right in the screenshot above.

When used with the MyWraps2 and ShowTable functions, the WrapUrl column is displayed as an “open in new tab” icon.

The Appends tab

On the Appends tab, you can append other wraps to the report. As an example, if railway carriages are subject to five different inspections, each documented in its own wrap, you probably want to create a full report that shows the merged result of all five inspections, per carriage.

1. When you define the wraps, use the same cell name for common data like car_no, depot, fails, comment etc.
2. When you define the report, start by creating a report for the first inspection wrap.
3. Include only the cell names/columns that are common to all the wraps in the report.
4. When you’re happy with the report for the first inspection wrap, append the other four wraps to the same report.