Improving the Performance of Report Cells/Grids

Having Report Cells on Records is a great way to add meaningful data to the already critical information held about a Person or Organisation on your database. Problems can arise, however, when these Reports become exceedingly large – impacting the load time of every Record a user might try to open. It’s therefore crucial to optimise these Reports to ensure your Workbooks stays quick and snappy.

Report Criteria Parameters work by feeding in the Criteria for the Report first – regardless of whether the Criteria lies on a Summary View. This ensures that only the Cells you want to see are loaded.

To begin setting up a Report Parameter on your report cell, navigate to the Report tab. At the bottom of the window you will notice a Section dedicated to Parameters.

Clicking the ‘Add Parameter’ button will initiate the setup window:

In this window you will need to configure 4 elements:

• Name – any combination of alphanumeric characters and underscores that begins with an ‘@’. We recommend that you name it something relevant to the Report as you will need to be able to identify it later on.
• Description (Optional) – a short account of the parameter and its purpose.
• Data type – ensure this is the same as the column the parameter will apply to.
• Default Value – this will normally be set blank, but should be populated with values for testing purposes.

Adding a criteria to this Report will now reveal the Parameter’s value option. Here you will find a Picklist from which you can select the Parameter you configured earlier, as well as options to open the Parameter or create a new one.

To ensure the Criteria Parameter is working, simply refresh the report with the new nil value Parameter and the Report should return no results.

Next, navigate to your Report Cell within the relevant Record Type Customisation window. Within the ‘Constrain results’ subsection, change the Report Column field to your parameter you set earlier. Also edit the Operator to ‘to the value of’ and ensure the Form Field is referencing the field you wish.

Once saved, the report cell will operate more efficiently – equating to faster load times on the relevant Record pages.