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# Report picker

The report picker control displays a list of reports available for the business object type being displayed.

The picker is also the gateway to editing and creating reports in AyaNova.

## Authorization Roles required

Many roles can select this object on other records where approriate. Editing or viewing this object in detail is only available to Users on any reportable object form to which they have access.

Report templates can be restricted to certain roles meaning some reports will not be listed for all users even if they have full rights to the underlying AyaNova business object type.

For example a Customer report could be restricted to the Business Administration role only even though the User may have full rights to edit Customers as the report may contain sensitive management level only information.

## How to access reports

Reports are accessed from the `Report` menu option in data table and single object edit forms. In addition the most recently used report will also be listed below the general `Report` option by it's name to give quick access to a commonly used report.

## How reports work

### Selecting

The image above shows a report picker for Work order reports. Because the logged in user has the Business administration role and is allowed to edit reports the image shows that each report listed also has an edit button to the right and there is a "New" option at the bottom to create a new report.

For Users without the right to edit reports the list will show all available reports for selection without the edit controls.

Clicking on a report name will select it for rendering. AyaNova will submit the report to the server to be rendered and show a "Generating report" control that will monitor the reporting job at the server and report back if it times out or open the report once it's completed. The Generating report control also has a `Cancel` button which will instruct the sever to stop rendering the report. Use this button if the report is taking too long to render.

Reports are designed to work with a single object or multiple objects so if you select a report from a data table, the report will display one or more selected records. If you select the same report from a single object's edit form the report will only display that object.

### Rendering

In AyaNova reports are "Rendered" (not "Printed") to a .PDF Portable document format format document and displayed in the browser for printing, viewing, saving or sending.

When a report is selected the AyaNova server will use the report template in conjunction with the object type and records selected to render the report into a .pdf file at the server and send back a link to the AyaNova web app which will trigger it to open the .pdf file in a new browser window. This means you must enable opening popup's in your web browser for your AyaNova server. Normally this will be a prompt one time only in the browser the first time you attempt to view a report from your AyaNova server.

If the browser was told not to allow the AyaNova server 'site' to open popups then it will need to be re-enabled in the browser by editing the site specific settings to allow popups in order to use the report rendering feature.

How exactly to do this is browser specific but typically it's a "Site setting" somewhere in the Settings user interface for that browser.

### Timeouts

Report rendering is the most resource "heavy" operation that the AyaNova server must do and sometimes a report may take too long to render and go over the configurable timeout setting in which case you will receive a timeout message instead of your report.

The number of records selected to report and the amount of memory, disk speed and available CPU% at the server directly relates to how long the reports can take to render. You can speed up rendering lengthy reports with a large number of records by breaking them down into smaller chunks.

For example, reporting on a month at a time rather than a whole year at a time of records by filtering the data table being reported.

If report rendering speed / timeouts is a recurring issue, we have report rendering timeout tips specifically for the I.T. system operator responsible for AyaNova server maintenance who may need to adjust the timeout configuration setting or provide more resources to the AyaNova server to alleviate the problem.