I like a lot ofthe features I see in PP. Very simple and easy to grasp. However, I haven't seen a feature to do reports. Are there any plans to have this feature? Or it's somewhere in there and I'm just missing it....
I like a lot ofthe features I see in PP. Very simple and easy to grasp. However, I haven't seen a feature to do reports. Are there any plans to have this feature? Or it's somewhere in there and I'm just missing it....
Hello darkchild,
At the moment there is no reporting functionality available.
How do you see it working? What kind of reports do you imagine?
Tim
I would like to see just a basic report that gives me a summary of overall project activity:
Numbers of task lists, tasks completed, messages posted, length of project from creation to completion etc.
Reporting is important part of project management. Anyway as i understand the main goal for PP was lightweight solution for small teams. It’s not intended to be a large enterprise solution. It’s really quick to learn and easy to use.
Maybe PP needs a good management project for managing itself?
Maybe we can create a list of default must to have reports?
I got here by searching for reporting on the site, so accept my apologies if I'm commenting on something that is covered elsewhere.
I would really like to see a report to show all the tasks for all the projects. In the system, I've created a few projects and attached some task lists for each, but I'd like to see a report of all projects and their related tasks. I'd even accept a web page that has that information, but it doesn't seem to exist in the system.
At a higher-level, I think at the very least there should be some sort of report system. Even if it was just a set of instructions on how to use a (separate) reporting tool and provided which database tables they'd want to pay attention to. I do a lot of MS sql server these days, so I'll give the example of Reporting Services, but I think there are similar open source web reporting apps that might be an easy fit.
I agree that sort of reporting is needed on some cases. But I dont think that complex reporting like MS Reporting Servises kind is the good solution for PP.
But MS SQL had sort of reporting tool that generated HTML reports. This used very smart logic:
1. Data set - database query with some parameters
2. HTML template - was used to generate output
Probably this of kind solution is the best.
But i have to say , that development of new features to the current PP platform is real hell, as you have to hack too much in core code. :(
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New ProjectPier edition available!!!
ProjectPier GoalPanel SF Edition.
I'm not sure, but I think there is a typo somewhere in your reply. I don't want to make this a MS SQL debate, but Reporting Services (SSRS) do exactly as you describe - a data set (a query) and a template that will display the data on a web page. The only issue is that it will only run on MS SQL.
I did find a way to build a report for PP using SSRS. I setup an ODBC connection for my MySQL db, and then a remote database connection in MS SQL to access it. I then used SSRS to write an open query to that MySQL database to display the data I want.
Kind of a hodgepodge solution. In fact, this is more of a making MySQL and MSSQL talk to each other solution than a reporting solution for PP, but I thought someone might appreciate knowing that it can be done.
Thank you!
Very good response! I haven’t needed for MySQL reporting, so I wasn’t informed about this solution. But it’s very good to know, as I might need it very soon for some projects :)
But probably this is not the best solution for non-developers.
I have opened in this forum the topic ProjectPier as Joomla component. and I guess this kind of solution will open actual door for for 3rd part developers to quickly create whatever extensions for ProjectPier.
___________________________________________
New ProjectPier edition available!!!
ProjectPier GoalPanel SF Edition.
This might do the trick: http://oreports.com
Hey guys,
I think that Project Pier is an awesome open-source tool. We are rolling out this functionality to a few different groups within our organisation for online collaboration.
I also agree that having a weekly/daily digest summary would be awesome. I don't really feel that it has to be anything massive or extensive but more just what the main overview page is displaying.
Why not just show the overview? Well in some cases you might have users who are heaps busy and can't always log into the system. If they see that more topic discussion or changes have been made they might go check it out. It also keeps people in the loop and regularly checking the progress of the project. This is becoming pretty standard in online collaboration communities like PBWorks, ActiveCollab, and other tools like that.
I wonder if there would be an easy way to render the Overview and spit that out to an email for each person in the group. I could look into doing something like that at some point but wanted to make sure no one has found a patch, addon, or solution instead.
I had a look at one of the suggestions above but that system seemed really huge and more like reporting of SQL activities.
So yeah if anyone could point me in the right direction of already developed solutions (cause my internet and forum scowering has found nothing) that would be awesome.
Thanks for all the contributions everyone has done thus far!
Peace
Shane
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Shane Bill
Web Developer
Hi,
What's the status of this? I am setting up a new install for a cliet and they'd like to know about reporting capabilities.
http://jzaksh.com/
We find that projectpier is terrific solution for communicating & tracking our IT projects. We have done some minor tweaks to it but it essentially unchanged.
We needed a simple reporting solution so that a manager could monitor all projects rather than having to dig through the individual threads in the web app.
FYI this is how we use the app:
We have milestones in each project that are time-based. We do not use tasks, instead we use messages and tags to assign ownership to each message. This keeps things nice and simple. We attached files to messages as required. The threaded feature of messages keeps everything related to that message in one place.
We created a single status report that sits in a sub-directory of the website. The report was created using phprunner and was easy to do once we got familiar with the db schema. phprunner can be found at http://xlinesoft.com/phprunner/index.htm.
phprunner is not the only option, you should be able to use any php report tool and add the reports as a subdirectory of the web app.
Nice to hear how you are using it.
Reporting is surely a must requisite in this tool as it helps project managers to quickly see the overall status of all running projects without going into all projects individually....
I'm working towards customizing PP according to our organizational needs. I want to add a new tab on main dashboard in parallel with below saying 'My Reports'
* Overview
* My projects
* My tasks
* My tickets
from where user could select a few parameters like dates etc and then can able to generate html and csv reports.
Please guide how one could do that and what files would be required to change.
Thanks in advance!
The fastest way to do that is to copy the complete folder application/plugins/tickets to another folder e.g. applications/plugins/reports.
1) edit applications/plugins/reports/init.php
1.a) replace the string ticket with the string report
1.b) check if you need tables or not and correspondingly change function reports_activate and reports_deactivate
2) TicketsController.class.php
2.a) rename TicketsController.class.php to ReportsController.class.php in applications/plugins/reports/controllers
2.b) edit ReportsController.class.php and rename TicketsController to ReportsController
2.c) rename my_tickets to my_reports
3) rename tickets.php to reports.php in applications/plugins/reports/language/en_us
4) edit application/plugins/reports/language/en_us/reports.php
4.a) replace the string ticket with the string report
Now try PP, you should see a new plugin in Administration / Plugins. Activate it and you should see the tab My Reports in Dashboard. Click the tab and the function my_reports in ReportsController.class.php will be executed (see below). PP framework will load view 'my_tickets.php' from application/plugins/reports/views.
Passing variables to views is done by the controller using function tpl_assign.
function my_reports() {$this->setLayout('dashboard');
$this->setTemplate('my_tickets');
$this->addHelper('textile');
tpl_assign('active_projects', logged_user()->getActiveProjects());
//$this->setSidebar(get_template_path('index_sidebar', 'tickets'));
} // my_reports
From here, fix the code to do what you want. Every url in the form
index.php?c=reports&a=index
is automatically mapped to class ReportsController in ReportsController.class.php. The value of a is the name of the method within that class. You can name it anything you want. There is no changing of the name by the code (only for the controller as 'reports' is turned into ReportsController). The style is to use underscores between words.
This should get you started.
Thanks for such a detailed steps.
I followed all the steps till point 4 and while tried to activate the reports plugin using admin my screen get washed out.
Most probably you made a mistake in editing the code. Happens to me all the time.
Check cache/log.php to see what error is there.
Most probably something wrong in application/plugins//reports/init.php.
Copy init.php to init.php.save and copy the init.php from links. That should get your screen back.