After months of work, the completed Custom Reports feature set is fully operational.  This upgrade adds the following features to the Club Registration system Custom Reports area:

• You can now include Cart level fields in your reports.  Cart level fields are displayed on the same line along with their Individual level field information (if selected.)  Cart level fields can also be used on any of the Filter By, Group By, or Order By areas.
• You can change the Ordinal of the selected fields on your report.
• You can add Filters to your report to finely tune the returned result set.  The advanced filtering system allows for compound filter clauses and both AND and OR joiners for very complex filter needs.
• Report Groupings can be defined to created visible groupings in your report output.  This can greatly enhance the usability of the reporting system and allow nicely organized reports for embedding in your own club's website.
• Report Orderings can be added to order the data by specified fields.
• The Excel file output format has been updated to enhance display and formatting issues, and to eliminate the occasional corruption errors that could happened with the old system.  Office 2007 users have special consideration with the new format, please refer to the documentation for details.
• The EMail list export format has been upgraded to eliminate duplicate e-mail addresses.
• The general usability of the Custom Reports area has been enhanced so that it's quicker to jump back and forth between editing and viewing a report.  You can now click "Save and Preview" to save your report and jump directly to the View mode.  As well, when viewing a report, you can click "Edit" to jump to the Report Editing area.
• As the Custom Reports area will become much more popular, the Reports link no longer default to the Cart tab view which can take quite a long time to produce each time.  Instead,  just a simple blank bar is displayed asking you to choose a tab.  This makes it much faster to get to the Custom Reports tab or any of the other report tabs.

For complete information on the new system, particularly for information concerning the Filter By feature, please refer to the Custom Reports documentation.  As the system is so new and there are such a miriade of Field types and Values that can be Filtered, Grouped, Ordered, etc, if you have any problems with a specific report, please send the details to Zone4 as some tweaking is undoutedly required.

As part of this launch, I wanted to do a simple case study of a registration by Kananaskis Alpine Ski Club which will highlight all of the new features of the reporting system and also showcase one of the ingenious ways that clubs have found to use the Club Registration system for their needs.

Craig Carpenter of KASC came up with the idea of using the Club Registration system to have club members post classified listing information for selling used equipment.  All that was required was a simple registration and as no money was being collected, it took advantage of the fact Zone4 waives the processing fees for no-fee registrations thereby providing a free service for their club members.  As each classified listing needed to be a simple separate entity, all of the fields were put at the Cart level for a Cart only registrations. You can preview the front end of the implementation here.

Note element 3. Select Menu for Item Type, and element 10. Admin-Only Checkbox for Sold.  These will become particularly useful for our Classified Listing Custom report. 

So now that the registration is setup and ready to go, we can create our Classified Listings Custom Report.  We click on the Report link for this registration and click on the Custom Reports tab.  We click the button to Create a new registration and enter a Report Name.  Firstly, we must select the fields we want in this report so we click to toggle the display of the Select Fields area.  Note that we do NOT include the Item Type field as we are going to be Grouping by that field, and we do NOT include the Sold field as we will be Filtering the data to only return items that have not sold yet.  We can also change the Ordinal of the fields to customize the order in which the columns are displayed.  Even though the Cart Number and Date Created fields are not defined for this registration, they are included by the system automatically and are available on all reports, filters, group by and orderings.

Now that we have finished with the Select Fields area, we can toggle the display area closed and proceed to the Filter By area.  For this report, we just need a single Filter to limit the report to only the unsold items.  So we select the "Check Box - Sold" field and as it's a checkbox, only the "IS EQUAL TO" Operator is available, and so we just leave the checkbox blank as we want to return records where "Sold IS EQUAL TO Not Checked"  Click Save to save the Filter and we are finished with the Filter By area.

Next, we want to take advantage of the fact this registration included an Item Type select menu element to help classify the items.  It would be nice to display each Item Type as a visible separate Grouping in the report.  So we toggle the display of the Group By area and select the "Select Menu - Item Type" field.  It doesn't matter much which order the Item Type Groups are displayed so we'll leave them as Ascending which is the order they were specified when the element was setup.  Click Save to save this Group By parameter.

And finally, it would be nice if the items in each group were ordered so the newest items were at the bottom and so we toggle the display on the Order By area and select the "Date - Created" field and Ascending Direction so we get items from the earliest date at the top to the most recent date at the bottom.

And now we can preview the report by click Save & Preview or simply save it and return to our Custom Reports listing area by clicking Save.

The final piece is to determine how we want our club members to see the classified listings.  For this, we need to go to the Live URL area.  Live URL's allow reports to be retrieved and viewed directly without having to login to the Club Services area.  If you only want the classified listings to display in their own window, you can just use the VIEW link and place this link somewhere on your own club website (or even in a text block on the registration.)  Members can access the listing by clicking on this like like this: http://www.zone4.ca/reportlive.asp?encrypt=da97eda129a57e94bc72b0a0a6c88d4e&output=1  The idea solution though, would be to have this classified listing report displayed right on your own club's website.  For this, you can use the EMBED report code.  Just place this small code snippet on a page in your own club website, and every time that page is called, your classified listings will be dynamically produced from Zone4.  So for instance, I've placed the following code snippet right below here (for display purposes only - this code will be hidden on your page, and be replaced by the actual report), and you can see the output of the Live KASC Classified Listing below.

<script language="Javascript" src="http://www.zone4.ca/reportlive.asp?encrypt=da97eda129a57e94bc72b0a0a6c88d4e&output=7"></script>