Table of Contents

Reports

Danielle Kellogg Updated by Danielle Kellogg

What are Reports?

Reports are views that allow you group the records in your objects and display them as charts or graphs so that you can see trends and compare values based on calculations.

A great example of this can be seen in our Donations Manager template app. In this app you can view a pie chart that displays how much money each event was able to raise compared to all of the money raised as a whole, a pivot table that displays the total amount donated for each event and a line graph that tracks how much was donated on each date.

You can read more about what is possible with reports here.

What do Reports look like in a live app?

Currently, there are five report types available in Knack: Pivot Tables, Pie Charts, Line Charts, Bar Charts, and Area Charts. The following is a summary of the different report types available with Knack:

Pivot Tables

Pivot tables show calculations based on two groupings, rows and columns:

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Pie Charts

Pie charts show calculations as percentages of the whole based on a single grouping:

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Line Charts

Line charts show calculations as a plotted line based on a single grouping:

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Bar Charts

Bar charts show calculations as bars based on a single grouping:

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Area Charts

Area Charts fill in the area below the data points on a line chart and can help to visual trendlines:

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Area charts can be set up in the follow ways under the Report > Layout Tab.

  • Basic area chart shows a comparison between spending of each department by displaying the values overlapped on a single plane
  • Normal stacked area chart shows how much each department contributed to overall spending, while showing the cumulative spending over time
  • Percentage stacked area chart shows the percentage of spending by each department relative to 100% of the total

Manage Reports

Adding and deleting report views are managed the same as other view types. To learn how to add and delete report views from your app, see About Views.

Edit Report Views

Editing a report view is slightly different from editing other views. A single report view can contain multiple charts. To edit a report select the pen icon in the page preview, this will allow you to change the title or description or add a new chart to the report view. 

Edit Individual Charts

Individual charts can be edited by hovering over that chart in the page preview and clicking the pen icon. This will open the settings for that specific chart, where you can edit the source, how the records will be grouped, add options and filters and manage the layout.

Report Settings

In the report settings you can manage the title and descriptions of the chart grouping or add additional charts to the report view.

Title & Descriptions

Add charts

Chart Settings

Whether adding a new report or editing an existing report, settings will open in the toolbox that will allow you to configure your chart’s settings. This window consists of five tabs: Source, Data, Options, Filters, and Layout & Design.

Source

Source will show you what records will display in your report. You can add source filters for your report here that limit the records that will display in the report. 

Note: Source filters do not remove rows from a report; they filter the records being aggregated in each row. So, if you add a data source filter for "Type is Business", excluded business records would still show, the Calculations for those records would just be 0. In order to remove the empty row from view, you would need to enable the exclude empty groups option (see options settings below).

You can read more on using a view’s Source here. 

Data

Groupings and calculations 

The Data section is where you can determine how your records will be grouped as well as what calculations your report will display. Depending on what report type you select, different options will be available here:

Equations cannot be used as rows or columns in pivot tables, but they can be used in calculations.

With each report you create, you will need to determine exactly how you want your records to be grouped and what will be calculated for each group. For bar, line and pie charts, you will be presented an option to group the chart and add a calculation:

Data Options

  • How will the chart group the records?
    • Bar charts, line charts, and pivot table report types can have one or more groupings. However, pie charts can only have one grouping.
  • What will the chart calculate for each group of records?
    • Calculations can include a record count or a sum, average, minimum, or maximum of any numeric field. Pivot tables, line and bar charts can include more than one calculation.

Additional groupings and calculations can be added to bar charts, line charts and pivot table report types by selecting the green "+" button next to the current group or calculation.

Knack gives you the option to further filter your groupings when using Connection fields and Date/Time fields.

Clicking the "gear" icon next to the grouping or calculation will open a popup that will allow you to edit the labels for your fields, sort or group your records, filter your records and determine exactly which records you want to show. Options vary, and aren't available across all field types.

Clicking the"options" link on a calculation row will open a similar window that will allow you to filter the values that are used in your calculation.

Record filters do not remove rows from a report. The record is still returned as an axis label on the graph, but any reporting numbers will not include records excluded by those filters.  In order to remove the empty row from view, you would need to enable the exclude empty groups option.

Summaries

In pivot tables, you can add both column and row summaries if more than one calculation is used. These can be added in the "Summaries" section of the report editor.

Options

The Options section contains extra features that you can add to further customize your reports. 

  • Exclude Empty Groups: This will remove groupings with no value (0) from your report.
  • Hide Negative Ranges: This will hide negative ranges from your report.
  • Click to Expand Group Records: This will allow users to click on your report groupings to open a popup with more details about the grouping.
  • Allow Print and Export Options: This will add the Print and Export option to your reports. Please note that this option is not available for pivot tables.

Filters

The filters section allows you to control how your users will (or will not) be able to filter the records which are displayed in the chart. 

  • Don't allow records to be filtered: This will remove the filter option from your report.
  • Enable users to filter records: This will give users the ability to add filters to your report. You can choose whether or not you want them to be able to filter based on the fields present in the report or all fields in your object.
  • Use a filter menu: This option will allow you to create predesignated filters that users can use to filter records on the page.

Layout & Design 

You can further customize the look of your report under the Layout tab:

In the layout section you can:

  • Edit the title and description of your report.
  • Change the location of the legend.
  • Customize the length and the width dimension of your report.

Use Reports in your App

Knack gives you multiple options to view and analyze your data in meaningful ways. To learn more about including reports in your app's workflow, checkout our learn more article Reporting in Knack.

Notes & Troubleshooting

Calculation limits

Our reports feature currently does not support calculations for record counts over 10,000 records. You could potentially display more than 10,000 records in a report, but each summation is limited to 10k records for its grouping.

If your source object has over 10,000 records, we advise adding filters to your view source to get the total record count under 10,000.

Read more about using the view source here.

Grouping limits

Every report has a grouping limit (the number of "cells" rendered) of 3,000 records. If you see an error when building your report, you will need to add filters to your groups to get the total number below 3,000 groups. 

Here is how groupings are calculated:

(# of unique records in each row) * (# of records in columns (if any)) * (# of calculations).

Example: 100 orders and 3 vendors, and you calculate the total number of records AND order total = 100 * 3 * 2 = 600 groupings.

Source filters do not restrict report groupings, as they are applied after the groups render. So, if you need to shave the number of groupings down in order to meet that 10,000 record limit, you will need to filter your report groupings. Filter options for groupings are only available for Connection fields, Multiple Choice fields and Date/Time fields.

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