Controlling the Display of Sorted Data With Accordion Reports

How to:

Reference:

Accordion Reports provide a way to control the amount of sorted data that appears on an HTML report page. You can produce reports with expandable views of data for each vertical sort field. When an Accordion Report first appears, only data values of the first (highest-level) vertical sort field are shown, and all other data is hidden. You can manually expand your view to expose data values of lower-level sort fields.

When you create an Accordion Report, a plus sign appears to the left of each data value in the column under the highest-level sort heading. For data associated with lower-level sort fields, a plus sign is to the left of each data value, but the data does not appear unless manually expanded. You cannot expand data values of the lowest-level sort field.

To expand your view of data for any expandable sort field, click a plus sign and all data associated with the next lower-level sort field appears. When you expand a data value under the next to lowest sort heading, all of the remaining associated data values in the report appear.

When using Accordion Reports, you must include two vertical sort fields coded with BY phrases. If the command syntax does not contain at least two BY phrases, the EXPANDABLE command is ignored, no message is generated, and a standard HTML report is created.

You can use horizontal sort fields coded with ACROSS phrases with Accordion Reports. The ACROSS sort headings that appear above vertical sort headings in a standard HTML report do not display in an Accordion Report until at least one sorted data value expands manually in each expandable sort column.

PDF and Excel formats are not supported with Accordion Reports.

Reference: Requirements for Accordion Reports

When you create Accordion Reports, consider the following requirements:

  • When you add a drill-down link to an Accordion Report, you must set the TARGET parameter to a value that specifies a new HTML frame.
  • Once an Accordion Report is created and delivered to the user, there are no subsequent calls to the WebFOCUS Reporting Server required when the user is interacting with the report. However, the collapsible folder controls on the sort fields require JavaScript that resides on the WebFOCUS Client. The user must be connected to the WebFOCUS Web tier components in order to use this feature. For online, connected users of WebFOCUS, no change is required to the report. However, for distribution of reports using ReportCaster, see Distributing Accordion Reports With ReportCaster to ensure that the report is delivered correctly as an email attachment or as an archived report in the Report Library.

Reference: Distributing Accordion Reports With ReportCaster

Distributing Accordion Reports with ReportCaster requires the use of JavaScript components and images located on the WebFOCUS Client.

To access the JavaScript components and images from a report distributed by ReportCaster, the scheduled procedure must contain the SET FOCHTMLURL command, which must be set to an absolute URL instead of the default value. For example, 

SET FOCHTMLURL = http://hostname[:port]/ibi_apps/ibi_html

where:

hostname[:port]

Is the host name and optional port number (specified only if you are not using the default port number) where the WebFOCUS Web application is deployed.

ibi_apps/ibi_html

Is the site-customized web server alias pointing to the WebFOCUS82/ibi_apps/ibi_html directory (where ibi_apps/ibi_html is the default value).

Reference: Support for Accordion Reports

The following commands are not supported in Accordion Reports: 

BORDER, COLUMN, FOR, IN, OVER, PAGE-NUM, ROW-TOTAL, TOTAL

Data Visualization, OLAP, On Demand Paging, and the ReportCaster burst feature are also not supported with Accordion Reports.

Syntax: How to Create Accordion Reports

To enable Accordion Reports, specify the following 

ON TABLE SET EXPANDABLE = {ON|OFF}
TABLE FILE GGSALES
SUM UNITS DOLLARS
BY REGION BY ST BY CITY BY CATEGORY
ON TABLE SET EXPANDABLE ON
END

where:

ON

Enables Accordion Reports.

OFF

Disables Accordion Reports. OFF is the default value.

Example: Creating an Accordion Report

This example shows how to use an EXPANDABLE command to create an Accordion Report. 

TABLE FILE GGSALES
SUM UNITS DOLLARS
BY REGION BY ST BY CITY BY CATEGORY
ON TABLE SET EXPANDABLE ON
END

The following image shows an Accordion Report which displays all data associated with the first-level sort field, Region, by default. The expanded data values you see are the result of a report user clicking plus signs to the left of specific first-level, second-level, and third-level sort fields after the report is generated.

Accordion Report image