Configuring Reports

Selecting Issues

The hybrid search bar is the main control used to select the JIRA projects and issues to be included in your report:

When the first Projects / Categories / Filters tab is selected, the system allows you to projects, project categories and saved filters, all using a drop-down list with autocompletion. If you instead wish to directly enter an advanced JIRA Query Language (JQL) search, you may also click on the JQL tab and enter your query directly.

This hybrid search bar was specially designed to provide fast and intuitive JIRA issue selection across the spectrum of JIRA users in your organization, including:

• new and casual JIRA users familiar with just the basics of their team's projects and issues,
• regular JIRA users who work with multiple projects, understand project categories and have defined their own JIRA search filters for qualified issue review, and
• JIRA power users who do advanced searches in the JIRA Issue Navigator and craft sophisticated JIRA Query Language (JQL) statements for complex searches.

Using the Projects, Categories and Filters Selector

Arsenale Dataplane's default search option provides direct, dropdown selection of one or more projects, project categories or saved filters.  The "Projects / Categories / Filters" tab over the search box will be highlighted in blue when you're using this type of search.

To make a selection, just click in the select box to open a dropdown list of all JIRA projects, project categories and saved filters, or start typing if you already know what you're looking for.  When typing to make your selection, auto-complete will kick in and show the options in the dropdown list that match what you're typing.

For instance, in the example below, the user wants to report on their "Support" project and starts typing s u p p. This displays the following matches in their JIRA instance, including a matching project, a matching project category, and a handful of filter options:

You can select multiple projects, project categories or saved filters to be reported on at once.  

You may even mix and match between these types of selections, for instance in the example below the user is creating a report based on a saved filter – "Assigned to Me - No Due Date" – augmented by all issues from a specific project "Arsenale Lockpoint".

You'll quickly come to love the flexibility of these Arsenale Dataplane searches, allowing effortless cross-project and cross-category reporting.

Advanced Issue Selection with JQL

For advanced users and more sophisticated searches, click on the "JQL" search tab to enter a search statement for your report using JIRA Query Language (JQL).

This JQL text entry box works exactly like JIRA's Advanced Search JQL box in the JIRA Issue Navigator, including auto-complete and on-the-fly statement validity checking.

The auto-complete feature will serve up options for existing projects, categories and filters as well as more advanced JQL syntax for compound statements and the like.

Here are some commonly-used JQL commands with which to experiment.

Selecting by Project:

project = "Acme Inc. Services"
project in ("Acme Inc. Services", "ClientCo Media Work", "Service Concepts")

Selecting by Project Category:

category = Products
category in (Products, Ops, Support)

Selecting by Saved Filter:

filter = "Open Issues - Assigned to Me"

project = "Acme Inc. Services" AND assignee = "Thomas Jefferson" AND resolution is EMPTY
category in (Products, Ops, Support) AND affectedVersion in ("0.9.0", "0.9.1")

Many reports in Arsenale Dataplane are historic in nature, meaning that they evaluate the past state of JIRA issues in your system, while other reports operate on the current state of issues.

For historic reports, the Start Date and End Date controls allow you to select the date range over which to report data. If you supply a Start Date but you leave the End Date blank, the end date of the report will automatically default to the end of the current day, week, month, quarter or year (depending on the value of the Interval control).

The Interval control controls whether the results will be aggregated on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.

Instead of specifying an explicit Start Date and End Date, you can also use the automatic Time Period control to select a range of dates relative to when the report is done. For example, you could select a time period of "Last 12 Months" or "Last 4 Weeks" to include results from the indicated time period.

The Including this month checkbox automatically appears when you have selected any of the "Last xx Months", "Last xx Weeks" and "Last xx Days" intervals. By default, this checkbox is enabled, and it indicates that the current interval will also be included in the report.

For example, assume that today's date is May 15 2014 and you run a monthly report with a time period of "Last 12 Months". If you enable the "Including this month" checkbox, the report date range would include June 1 2013 to May 31 2014. Instead, if you disable the checkbox, the report date range would instead be May 1 2013 through Apr 30 2014.

Segmenting Results

Most reports provide the ability to segment (or break down) the results in the report chart and data table using the "Segment By" report option. Segmentation lets you group results by the value of one or more JIRA issue fields or properties. 

Click in the Segment By select box to open a dropdown list of all possible segmentations, or just start typing if you already know what you are looking for.  You may select any number of segmentations. The more options selected, the more fine grained the break down in your results data.

For historical reports, segmentation can be performed in one of two manners for any given issue field or property of interest: based on the current value of the issue field, or based on a past/historical value of the field. The value in the first section of the dropdown, Current Values, will show the current value of the issue field. To segment by a field's historical value, select that field's (Historical) derivative in the Historical Values section of the dropdown. Note that historical values are not supported for all field types.

For example, suppose that you are using Arsenale Dataplane to display a report of issues created by date, segmented by assignee. If you ask Arsenale Dataplane to simply segment by assignee, it will group the issues in the output based on each issue's current assignee. However, if you ask it to segment by the historical assignee, it will group the issues based on the assignee that the issue had at the beginning of each selected interval.

Configuring the Display of Statistics

Dataplane allows you to enable or disable the display of the statistics sections in the report results. By default, all relevant statistics will be displayed. To modify the output, click the More Options link in the report configuration:

This toggles the display of the Show Statistics section. From this section, you can selectively add or remove any of the statistics that you wish to display in the report results. Not all reports have statistics and the More Options toggle may not be available in those cases.

For example, the following screenshot shows the report output when only the Total Issues statistic is selected (rather than the default of Total, Average, Minimum and Maximum):

Running a Configured Report

Once you have filled in all of the required parameters, click the Run Report button to execute the report. Arsenale Dataplane will perform the required calculations and display the requested data.

Changing Configuration Options

To select different report configuration options and re-run the report, click the Configuration tab, which will switch the page back to the configuration panel. You may switch back and forth between the Configuration, Report and Data tabs at any time without losing information.

After you have made changes on the Configuration tab, you can click Run Report again to re-run the report and see the new results, and optionally click the Save button to update your saved report.