Appexchanging Reports and Dashboards
I spent a bunch of time today creating some stock reports and a dashboard with the goal of using Appexchange to deploy them to my customers’ Salesforce.com instances.
Reports are time consuming to create, dashboards even more so. Here’s what I’ve learned in my first day trying to replicate for nonprofit functions what Scott Hemmeter has done for user adoption:
- Dashboard widgets sometimes don’t visualize the way you want–the axes may be reversed, or your vertical stack graph may be stacking what you want across the X-axis. I found out an undocumented feature: Create a Chart on the report you’re using for your dashboard (it’s the last step in the report wizard)–you have much more control over the display. When you create a dashboard widget on that report, it looks at the chart information and sets up your chart the way you did on the report.
- If you reference any custom objects, the object will be installed right along with the reports. That’s probably not desireable behavior, unless you package up reports with the install package for the objects themselves. Then the user gets the object installed, and the reports all at once.
- Don’t reference any custom fields on standard objects. Appexchange just won’t let you do it. My strategy is to use only standard fields–you can always add custom fields to the reports later.
- You can build reports that use record types, but they will be screwed up on install. I’ve got reports that look only at Gifts. After install, I have to open up all those reports and change the criteria to use the right record type–the reports won’t show any data until you fix that. A pain, but pretty quick.
- The and dashboards are installed in a folder with the same name that they came from. You don’t run into naming conflicts, but you do want to name the folders wisely.
I’m pretty excited as this is going to save me tons of time, and give me a way to share my reporting best practices. This approach will save me a ton of time–I’m glad I finally got around to digging in to it.
Feel free to install the reports and dashboard. Let me know what you think!
