Has anyone here edited the standard Infomaker report Ticket Sales by Period? We are starting to depend on that report, but the standard sort order does not work for us; it needs to be sorted by performance date/time. We are self-hosted, and I do have a licensed copy of Infomaker 2017 R3, but it has been a while since I have modified reports, and then only custom reports.
Clarke
We also decided to go with an SSRS version of the report. Firstly, there are a couple of things with the standard procedure behind the report that CAN return slightly incorrect ticket counts. Secondly, the way we report on donate for resale money is different than the standard report results would indicate. In general, the T_ORDER_SEAT_HIST table is just a bit of a crazy thing, so we decided to just bypass it entirely looking straight at the sub line items for the final results. Lastly, we wanted it to be usable for TOTG, thus SSRS.
TECHNICALLY not as "true" to reality as using the T_ORDER_SEAT_HIST table as when you have exchanges/refunds in play and you are looking at a specific sales period in the past they will show up on a different date. That said, 99.9% of the time, our staff is using it for as a cumulative sales report, and I am pretty sure that, despite explaining where this issue lies to many people that I am still one of the few who understands exactly what the slight of hand actually is. I wrote another post some years ago on where there were some issues with the standard report.
That said, what are you looking to do with it that you want it edited?
We just want the sort order to be by perf date/time rather than perf ID. I thought that would be an easy thing, but changing the Rows/Sort does not appear to have any effect.
Is this for scheduled reports or just when running it manually? If you are just worried about running it manually, then you could potentially do it by putting a sort grouping header to the perf_dt column in InfoMaker. Sometimes that works.
If you need it for scheduled reports, chances are you are going to need to do something in the code. Without looking, I would assume the sorting is determined at the SQL level and so InfoMaker is simply sorting the results it has based on the pre-sorted data. The way the groupings work for that report is a smidge odd because there are so many calculated columns/rows/fields.
In summary, when it comes to updating this report, you will likely have to do more work than you thought because there is a lot involved. When I needed to make a custom version of the standard Hold Code Report for our use, I tweaked some things, rebuilt the InfoMaker screen and deployed the finished report for Box Office use in under 2 hours. This is not likely going to be that easy of a report for you. Our custom version took me a while to build.
Good question; the main usage is for scheduled reports. I am a lot more comfortable altering SQL than working in Infomaker, so I guess that is good news. Where do I find what stored procedure powers a report in Infomaker, or is it strictly determined by naming convention?
Naming convention will get you where you want to go about 70% of the time when looking to customize standard Tessitura reports.
However, when it will not, it really does not. But it is easy enough to find in InfoMaker for 98% of reports. Go to the "Column Specification" tab/section of InfoMaker, right click, and you can find a choice for "Stored Procedure", and that should have what you want.
Then again, in this case, naming convention works, and it is a good thing, because this report is a Crosstab style, and in InfoMaker, there is unfortunately no way to find the procedure for a particular Crosstab report (or at least, none to my knowledge). So to take out the middle man, you are looking for RP_TICKET_SALES_BY_PERIOD.
Good luck!