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Reports

Reports provide a quick and easy way to get insights on your application data. A report is a panel on the application's dashboard that shows one or more series of aggregated data as a grid or a chart. Select what to aggregate, group the data by its properties, and apply filters — all from the Portal.

Creating a report

To create a report, open the Reports tab of your application in the Portal and click New report. The Help button in the header of the tab explains the reports.

Setting Required Description
Title Yes A descriptive name for the report
Visualization Yes How to visualize the data: Grid, Pie chart, Line chart, Bar chart, Radar chart or Stacked bar chart
Time range No The last hours, days, months or years to show (e.g. Last 7 days, or a custom number and unit). It applies to series that are grouped by a date first
Max points per series Yes Top N: the most groups a series shows (1–1,000), the groups with the largest values. It applies to a series with a time range too: with the default of 20, a daily series over Last 30 days shows only its 20 busiest days. Raise it to at least the number of groups in the range

A report has one or more series. Each series has:

Setting Required Description
Label Yes The name of the series in the legend
Entity Yes The entity to query data from
Group by Yes The property or properties to group results by
Property Yes The value to show: a property with its aggregate (e.g. ID.Count)
Filter No Optional filter to narrow down the data

What a series can show depends on the entity and the visualization; the editor offers only what fits:

  • Property: ID.Count counts the records. A number property can be Max, Min, Sum or Avg. A text or date property can be Max or Min, in a Grid only.
  • Group by: one or more properties, each listed once. A date is grouped by its parts: Created.Year, Created.Month, Created.Day, Created.Hour, Created.Minute and Created.Second. A Line chart groups by numbers and dates only; the other visualizations also by text and yes/no properties.
  • A Pie chart draws the first series only.
  • Time range: a number from 1 to 1000 followed by hours, days, months or years.

A new application already has one report, User registrations per day: a line chart of the entity Users, grouped by Created.Year, Created.Month and Created.Day, counting ID.Count. Edit it to see how a series is put together.

On the dashboard, drag a panel by its title to move it and by its edges to resize it; the layout is saved automatically. On a narrow screen the panels are shown in one column. The menu of a panel has Edit, View API endpoint and Delete.

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Report types

The three types below are shown as examples. Bar, Radar and Stacked bar charts take the same settings.

Grid

Displays aggregated data in a tabular format. Best for detailed numeric comparisons across groups.

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Pie chart

Displays aggregated data as proportional slices. Best for showing the distribution or composition of a single metric across groups.

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Line chart

Displays aggregated data as a line graph. Best for showing trends over time or ordered categories.

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How reports work

Reports are powered by the Stats/Aggregate API endpoint under the hood. When you view a report in the Portal, your browser makes one request per series to the API, like:

GET /api/Stats/Aggregate?Entity={entity}&Properties={property}&Filter={filter}&GroupBy={groupBy}&PageIndex=1&PageSize={maxPoints}

View API endpoint in the menu of a panel shows the exact address of each series.

This means a report can be reproduced by any client with the same call. In the Portal the calls are made as the person who manages the application, with full access: the security rules and rate limits do not apply there. A client of your own that calls the address shown by View API endpoint is a normal caller: it needs a get rule on the entity, and it gets only the properties and records that rule gives.

Tips

  • Use filters to focus reports on specific subsets of data (e.g., records created in the last 30 days)
  • Group by date properties (like Created) for time-series analysis using line charts
  • Combine with distinct values — use the Stats/Distinct endpoint to discover available grouping values
  • Multiple reports can be created for the same entity with different configurations to provide different views of the data