Part 5: Reports

K2 offers a number of technologies for reporting on and administering workflows. In previous user guides, you have explored the capabilities of K2 Workspace for administering workflows and providing very detailed reports on process/activity instances. (Refer to the Reporting in K2 tutorial for expanded reporting instructions.)

In the next section you will work solely with K2 Designer and create a new view that contains Reporting controls. You will then add that view to a new form and configure rules to call the Reporting chart data when the form is loaded.

Dashboard-style reporting controls are found in K2 Designer (only) and are available to use on any view as needed. These controls include charts and grids and can be configured to provide real-time feedback.

In this part, you will learn:

If you have not completed Part 4: Workflows of this tutorial yet, please do so now since you will be using the submitted data (that your testing produced) as content for your Reports.

For instances where you want to create more of a dashboard type of report, K2 Designer has a number of controls that can easily be implemented on a new form/view or even as a web part in SharePoint. For this exercise, you will explore Reporting controls found in K2 Designer.

Step 20 Tasks

  1. Create a New View from the views category and Name it
    Sales Orders Reports
    and confirm the Item View option is highlighted.
  2. Configure the layout table for 1 Column and 2 Rows. Add a Workflow Duration Chart control into the first table row and an Activity Instances Chart into the second table row.
  3. Make the following configuration changes in the Properties pane for the Workflow Duration Chart:
    4. Name Value
    Name Sales Orders Instances
    Title Sales Orders Submitted
    Workflow Names Sales Orders Process
    Range This Week
    Group By Daily
    Display Value Instance Count
  4. Make the following configuration changes in the Properties pane for the Activity Instances Chart:
    5. Name Value
    Name Activity Instances Chart
    Title Workflow Status
    Workflow Names Sales Orders Process
    Range This Week
    Display Value Instance Count
  5. Edit the view’s When the View executed Initialize rule and add two new Actions to Execute a control’s method as indicated in the image below. Change the Actions to run in a batch. (There are no other configurations necessary.)

  6. Create a New Form from the Forms category and Name
    Sales Orders Dashboard
    then change the form’s Width to
    60%
    and add the Sales Orders Reports view to the canvas.
  7. Run the Sales Orders Dashboard form to confirm the charts are being populated with workflow data.
  1. In K2 Designer, right-click the Views category and select New View. Click Next on the view home screen. Name the view
    Sales Orders Reports
    and confirm the Item View option is highlighted. Click Next.
  2. Select the Create Layout Table only. Set the table layout for 1 Column and 2 Rows. Click on the Controls tab and drag a Workflow Duration Chart found under the Reports heading, into the first table row.

  3. Drag an Activity Instances Chart into the second table row.

  4. Click on the Workflow Duration Chart to highlight it. In the Properties pane, change the Name to
    Sales Orders Instances
    and the Title to
    Number of Sales Orders submitted

  5. In the Properties pane, under Filters, open the Select Workflows editor for the Workflow Names field. Add the Sales Orders Process workflow. In this step, you are telling K2 to retrieve the statistics for the Sales Orders Process workflow. If you were creating a broader-based chart, you could add additional workflows as well.

  6. Under the Chart Data heading, change the Range to This Week, the Group By value to Daily and the Display Value to Instance Count.

    7. This completes the configuration for the Sales Orders Instances chart. Using almost the same steps, you’ll configure the settings for the Activity Instances chart.

  7. Make the following configuration changes to the Activity Instances chart:
    • Name: Activity Instances Chart
    • Title: Workflow Status
    • Workflow Names: Add the Sales Orders Workflow
    • Range: This Week
    • Display Value: Instance Count

    8. The last step for your chart view is to configure two Actions that will populate the charts when the view loads.

  8. Click on the Rules tab located in the Breadcrumb Bar. Highlight When the View executed Initialize and click Edit Rule.

  9. Click on the Actions tab, then search for
    execute a control
    then click the Action, Execute a control’s method, to add it to the rule definition pane.
  10. Click the select control link and select Sales Orders Instances. Click the select method link and select Run Chart.
  11. Add another Execute a control’s method to the rule definition pane and select Activity Instances Chart for the control and Run Chart for the method.
  12. Change the Actions to run as a batch.

    13. Click OK and then Finish to complete the chart and view configurations. Check In the Reports view.

    In the next step, you will create a form for the Sales Orders Reports view. This will allow the reports to be exposed to external sources and users.

  13. Right-click the Forms category and select New Form. Click Next on the forms home screen. Name the form
    Sales Orders Dashboard
    and click Next.
  14. Click anywhere within the form canvas and change the Width to
    60%
    in the Properties pane.
    15. SmartForms are browser based. If you were to run the form without setting a width, the charts would stretch the width of the browser screen. This might be hard to read if the user has a wide monitor. By setting the form's width to 60%, you can control the output so that the charts are easier to read. The width setting is optional, but it is always a good practice to keep in mind your user experience when designing forms.

  15. Drag the Sales Orders Reports view into the form canvas. Change the View Title to
    Sales Orders Reports
    then click Finish and Check In the form. Run the form to check out the drop & drag Reporting capabilities of K2 Designer! (Your results won’t be exactly as shown.) If time allows, submit a few more Sales Orders forms then Run the Reports view once again to see the charts update in real-time.

STEP 20 REVIEW

In this last step for building your Sales Orders application, you created a mini-dashboard in K2 Designer using built-in reporting controls. While workflow administration would likely take place in K2 Workspace, there are a number of powerful controls that can be implemented with drop & drag methods. The ability to configure multiple charts in a single view makes creating summary dashboards quick and highly flexible. If you are in a SharePoint environment with K2 enabled, you can add a K2 Web Form web part to display this form directly on a SharePoint page.

This concludes Part 5: Reports. In Part 6: Debugging SmartForms, you will learn how to add a query string to the Runtime URL of your SmartForm to expose debugging logs.