Rock U - Reporting - Data View Overview

Transcribed Video Content

Data views are a really crucial building block in Rock. Now there's all kinds of ways that you can extend them. In fact, you can use them for communication lists, reports, and a lot more. And think of data views sort of a filter that you can really customize. For example, you can output a list of the people that have attended your organization or your church in the last thirty days. You can even list volunteers at a specific campus. Any kind of entity is something that you can filter on. Now let's look at what it looks to set up a data view in Rock right now. Let's go find data views, talk about them a little bit, and then I'll show you how to set one up. So first go to tools and then up and click on data views. It's really up high there because data views are crucial to reporting. You'll end up using these for all sorts of reporting purposes and they can be used in all sorts of contexts, whatever you need to filter for a list of entities. But a simple way to think about data views, and I'll go ahead and click on one now, our adult member and attendees data view, is this is a list of filters that you can use any field in Rock for and any entity for. So in this case, we have a data view of people and the filter we have on people is where their record status is active and their connection status is member or attendee. We've set a category for this as well. And you can see that we've pretty recently run this data view and we actually have the results right here. Now you can see these are all people that match the filters we have. So Ted Decker, we know his record status is active and connection status is member or attendee. Can see lots of information here and there's so many actions we can take on this list of people whether we want to merge a document, we wanna get an Excel file, run a workflow, bulk update, send a communication. This is super powerful and it's a great way to turn what might be considered a complicated list of attributes that you need to get into a list of entities that you can actually act on. So we have this example right here, and we're going to click edit so we can see how we set up this data view. First of all, we've picked a nice name and a description that makes sense. We have a category of foundational views and you can see it's categorized over here under foundational views. And what you always start with when you're setting up a data view is picking the entity. So you can pick from all sorts of entities in Rock. You'll probably commonly use person or group. Then we've picked include deceased as no. So in the case of people, this just won't show anyone who is marked as deceased in your system. We also have another video where we cover post filter transformation, but this essentially allows you to manipulate the results you get and get something helpful. So for example, you could find the father of the person who is output here if you use a post filter transformation. We can pick an icon that we want to use that will help us find this easier in the future if you . So you could do this, for example. I'll show you what that looks in a second. You can pick a highlight color as well. Then this is something very important. So data views are running some complex queries in the backgrounds to get this list of people. And it it might take a second if you come back to this data view pretty often or you're using this data view to populate a report or something else. It would have to, in the background, run again and again finding the people that match these results, for example. But if you persist it, if you choose a persistent schedule, you can pick between either a named schedule that you've created, you can set up a unique schedule, or simply use this handy slider to pick an interval of how often this data view is run for you. And basically, Rock will keep the results handy so that whenever you need them, they're available, no need to run on demand. So every twenty three hours in this case, this will persist and this data view will be run. Now this is where filtering comes in. Those filters you saw beforehand, this is how we create them. You can add a filter group which will allow you to create multiple filters and you can pick the conditions of when to show. And then you can add new filters, and there are tons and tons of different filters based on the entity you're looking at. And, also, you can pick all sorts of fields to filter on. So you can get super specific about what you wanna show. Here, we have the filter type of person fields and we've picked the field record status, and it's listed our record statuses that we have available. And we're we've just chosen that we wanna show active record status people. Then another filter type of person fields and then connection status. We've picked member, attendee. This makes it really easy for you to filter on the people or entities in your database. Then if you wanna preview and before you even save the data view, see some examples of who's gonna be output just to make sure it's working properly, you can very easily do that. But let's just save this. And something I wanna show you is the power of stacking data views on top of each other. So you can see there's a linkage here that says data views, adult member and attendees, females. And this is because this data view is actually pulling from the data view that we just edited. So let's click on it. It'll take us there and we can see now we have a list of all the same people we had before, but they're all female and we've done that on purpose. So if you click edit here, you'll see we have some similar settings set up, but one of the filters we added is filter type of existing data view. Then we've picked the data view that we just created, and we're using the persisted version, and it's pulling all the people from there. Then we filter to make sure that gender is female. And there we go. That's a really nice way that you can stack filters and data views on top of each other to make even more powerful data views, and you don't have to recreate all the components of the last one. Then one thing I wanted to mention is remember earlier, we set up that TI TI user icon. This is what it looks right here. It's popped up and it's just a nice way to categorize or make it easier to find a data view later. Now, one other thing I wanna mention is you can set security on these data views in case you want people to not be able to view or edit them. If there's sensitive info, you can easily copy a data view and then use that and change filters and other settings very easily so you don't have to start from scratch. Then in another video, we'll we'll cover reports. Reports essentially allow you to pull only the information you want out of the results. So for example, we have the nickname, last name, gender, or email. With a report, can be really specific about what fields you want back and just get a really powerful set of data. All the data views that you create are assets. The more common lists that you used to create manually in the past that you replace with a data view, that's less work for you as these will update automatically for you and give you the exact information that you've asked for. Thanks for watching this video.