July 13, 2020

Think Like A Workfront Admin: Creating Reports Like a Pro! Advanced Groupings | Part 1

Let’s return to the report we created in our last series, “Advanced Views”. Recall, we added two additional custom columns that displayed data for Days Remaining and Hours Remaining. For each custom View, we leveraged the following functions:

  • displayname
  • valueexpression
  • valueformat
  • textmode

Similarly, we will use many of the functions above within an advanced Grouping, but the syntax will be different.

Unlike advanced Views, advanced Groupings begin with “group.[#].” before identifying the function. When you create your Groupings using the standard user interface, you are limited to three groupings for a standard list or, four groupings when leveraging the matrix setting. However, you can add more groupings when you create your own advanced Groupings but be careful. The more groupings you add to a standard object list report, the messier your report will look.

The syntax for each line within an advanced Grouping reads: group.[#].function. The [#] portion of the text mode identifies which Grouping the function belongs to. Groupings start at 0 and continue to increase by one. For example, the first Grouping in a report is actually group.0.function. The second Grouping is group.1.function and so on. The only exception to the rule is the line for textmode. The textmode line does not use the same format of group.[#].function, but is written as textmode=true (identical to advanced Views).

 

Challenge:

Our work license users want the “My Tasks Due This Week” report to group their tasks by timeliness: LATE, ON TIME, UPCOMING.

  • LATE: Defined as any task with a planned completion date less than today’s date.
  • ON-TIME: Defined as any task with a planned completion date equal to today’s date.
  • UPCOMING: Defined as any task with a planned completion date greater than today’s date.

 

Solution:

We will create custom advanced Groupings to group tasks under the three labels identified above: LATE, ON TIME, and UPCOMING.

Your report will go from this:

To this:

 

In Advanced Groupings Part II, we are going to discuss how to write the custom text mode to solve the challenge.
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