So the reporting system in Salesforce is a bit restricting. It seems there is no editor for an xml or other markup language to create reports in; apart from formulas you’re stuck in the website drag and drop ui.
There seems to be 3 types of reports in Salesforce Tabular, Summary and Matrix. The first kind is kind of useless for more advanced reports, since it doesn’t support forumulas (if both fields are in the same table you can work around this with calculated fields). However with all 3 I’ve found it difficult to impossible to make a report with basic details and summarized figures.
An example:
I’ve added a custom field “company size” to the Account table/object. This tracks the approximate number of employees working at the customers company (ever taken one of those surveys that asked you for a range of how many employees worked in your organization). I then have a custom table/object for sales, listing the account, the date and the volume ($).
I would think it would be a simple to create spreadsheet style report with each row listing an account, which state it was based in, how many employees they had, followed by their total sales and sales/employee (a formula of volume/employees).
But the grouping and summarization options don’t seem to work that way. Grouping in both the Summary and Matrix report types seems to want to treat each grouped field as a seperate level, so with the 3 fields related to the account I get 3 cascading fields in a stair like arrangement, instead of being able to put them on one row.
It gets worse with the summarization – no matter what I and other colleague have tried the summarization doesn’t seem to work. If an account has 50 sales we end up with 50 rows, even if we click the little arrow beside the column, click summarize and check Sum.
From an SQL perspective this report seems like something you would teach students in the first week, yet its really not obvious how translate this into something Salesforce can understand. A lot of the web ui is not discoverable (dragging fields provides no feedback as to why it can’t be dropped in a particular place, some options are hidden unless you hover the mouse over the right place) so I would not be surprised if I’ve missed a crucial step.
So, is there an option to make this work (particularly getting sales to be totaled as a single cell for each account, not 2 or 5 or 50), maybe a distict checkbox lurking behind an innocent blank area?
Given the lack of calculated fields in the report, you need to create the formula at the object level. If it’s not useful in the detail page, don’t include it in the page layout. It will still be available in reporting.
The summarization/grouping options work as in SQL, but you can only group by one field at a time.
However, the result view in “show details” mode is not like a simple SQL query – more like using windowing functions where the result output can contain both groupings with aggregations at those levels, and the detail rows that fed into that grouping.
In “hide details” mode, the detail rows are not shown, and so only grouping levels and the aggregates are shown.
So, it looks like you can either:
group by state, then account, sum your employees, sum sales, and then a Custom Summary formula of sum:sales/sum:employees
or
create a formula field on account to do sales/employees
tabular report with fields of: account, state, employees, sales, your new field.
Also, if you want an XML editor, you can edit the XML for reports (as with many other parts of salesforce setup) via the metadata API and the force.com plugin for eclipse. But it’s mainly for tweaking reports, or version control, or mass-actions, as there is no preview/run operations, it’s mostly a metadata management system.