Rock U - Reporting - Data View Overview v13

Transcribed Video Content

Data views are how we filter down data to just the rows that we're interested in, as mentioned in the reporting strategy video. Let's take a look at how to work with data views. Let's take a look at one of our foundational data views, adult members and attendees. This data view ships with Rock, but feel free to change it if this isn't a foundational data view for you. On this slide is the definition of what adult members and attendees are. So we can see that we're looking for a record status of active, and the connection status needs to be either attendee or member, and the person has to be in a group of type family with the role of adult. So they have to be an adult in a family. Now, are all driven by filters. And we have lots of different filters for different entities. So, here are some of the filters that you can use for a person. You can filter, for instance, by their age, by their grade, attendance in certain groups. There's a lot of different options. For comparison purposes, we also have lots of filters for a group. , you can filter a group by its campus, by the group type, things that. Each entity, person or group, has different filters that you can use for that entity. And, of course, there are other uses for data views, which we'll cover in a separate video. But here on this slide, you can just see, some of the common uses. So now let's take a look at a data view in Rock. So here in Rock, to work with data views, we're gonna go to tools, and then under tools, we have data views. And we'll click on that. And we'll take a look at, that same data view we were looking at at the slide show, which is under foundational views, adult member, and attendees. So you'll note here that the filter section shows you what the data view is doing in English, just we saw on the first slide. And then down below, as was noted in the strategy video, data views can work on top of each other. So down here, you can see other data views that use this data view, which tells you which data views would be impacted if you were to change this one. If the data view is used in any reports, you'd also see a section here for reports, it would list out the reports that use this data view, which again would tell you if you make changes to the data view, here are the reports that are gonna be impacted by that. So let's go ahead and edit this data view to take a look at, what makes it up. So, of course, we start off with the name and the description, both of which are very important to indicate what the data view is doing, and sometimes why. Then over here, have the post filter transformation, which is discussed in a separate RockU video, so we're gonna kinda skip over that. And then you have the category that it falls into. And, , you use categories to help group data views, and that becomes really important as your list of data views grows because this helps you, organize and categorize them. Down below that, you have the option to, include deceased people. So this is a this is a person data view, and by default, deceased people are not included in the results. But if you want deceased people included, you can enable this. And then down below here, we have enable persistence, which is a speed setting. And what this does if you enable it is it saves the results for the specified length of time, before going back to to check for the results again, before refreshing. And this helps make the data view and the reporting off of it much, much faster. Faster. So it's strongly recommended that you persist data views, for as long of a period as as makes sense, because it'll help things go a lot faster. There's actually a Rock job that goes with this called update persistent data views, that'll go through and it'll make those updates based on the time interval that you select here. And, again, to wrap up this section, we have the applies to field. This is the entity that we're actually reporting on. Most of the time, it'll be person or group, but you can report on any entity in Rock, and they all pretty much work the same way. Then down below, we have our actual filters. So this is taking the people and then filtering down to just the people that we want based on these filters. So at the at the start here, you'll note that all is selected, and so is true. And that means that all of these conditions listed down below must be true in order for the person to be returned by the data view. You could instead switch this to any, and that would kinda make it if you put an or in between each of these conditions. It'll say record status is active, or the connection status is member or attendee, or they're in a group of group type, etcetera. Whereas the all would be sort of ands, where you would say record status is active and connection status is member or attendee, etcetera. But we'll leave this at all. And then, again, you can change it to be false or true. So if we wanted all of these to be false, then this first condition here, record status is active, what it would do is it would bring back everybody whose record status is not active because we're looking for these to be false. And that would apply to all of these filters. So, again, we're gonna leave that at true, and we'll take a look at some of these filters. So the first one here is that the record status is active. So we're using a person field. It's a field on the person table for record status, and we're saying that we only want people whose record status is active. So we have active selected. Then down below, very similar type of thing. We're looking at the person's connection status, and we're looking for connection statuses of member or attendee. So those are both selected. And then down below, we have a slightly different filter type. Here, it's in group of group type. So we picked this instead of, using person fields we saw on on the other two filters. And so here, we just pick the group type that we're interested in, and the role that we want the person to have, in this case, adult. And then you can choose a group status, and a group member status. We have those, set up here for this data view. And that's all you need. So let's go ahead and add a new filter just to give you an example of some of the filter type options that you have. So, again, the first one here is gonna be person fields, and that's what we're using now for, , the record status and the connection status. And when you click here, you can see the common person fields that get used. And then down below are all of the person fields. You can also, filter against person attributes, ability level, allergy, etcetera. So you can use attributes in your filters as well. But there are different types of filters. So we're using person filters here, but you could also, for instance, use existing data view. And that would mean only bring people back in this data view if the person is listed in this other data view. And so that's how you can, sort of build data views off of other data views. Similarly, you have not an existing data view, which does the opposite. So here you'll provide a data view, and the person will be returned here in our current data view only if they're not in this other data view that we've that we've selected. And then, of course, down below, have some just additional filters. So these are things that aren't necessarily properties on the person tab. Then we have, some attendance, related data views. There's a lot that you can do here. So what we do is we recommend that you step through this list, for each of the different types of entities you might be working with so that you can get familiar with the different tools that you have in your tool belt. So let's go ahead and exit out of this. We won't save any of the changes we made. We'll just leave it as is. And let's go ahead and click on the adult member and attendees' females data view. Now, if we go through and edit this data view, you might be expecting it to be very similar to adult members and attendees, because after all, these are still adult members and attendees that they're just females. But this is where the power of data views lies, is, we said before, we can instead use an existing data view and say, they need to be returned by this data view. And in this case, we're choosing adult members and attendees. So all of the logic that goes into this data view is sort of now inherited by this data view. Right off the bat, this list is only going to include adult members and attendees. And then so we don't have to recreate all that criteria. We don't have to add filters for the connection status and the record status and all that stuff. We can just say, go get me the people that are in this data view. And then all we have to do is add an additional filter to say that the person's gender is female. And that's all we need to get female members and attendees. We'll just reference this other data view that gets us members and attendees, and then we're gonna filter it out to see only females. So those are the basics of working with data views. For more details on working with data views, be sure and check out the other Rock U videos that we have, here in the reporting area. And you can also check out our taking off with reporting user guide posted to the Rock Community website. Thanks for watching.