If your church is anything like ours, you have more data views, reports, and other reporting tools and pages than you know what to do with. That is the case here. We LOVE lists, metrics, and filterable reports. With this, we had a lot of trouble keeping track of all these tools. Thankfully during Master Class, we happened upon a couple slick and effective ways to find and track all of these reporting tools (shoutout Michael Garrison!!).

With that context in mind, I’d like to walk through our Data View Finder.

Data View Finder

Purpose: Offer a means of searching for Data Views and reviewing their usage in one location.

How: This Finder is simply a Dynamic Report. Here’s a step-by-step process for building your own.

1. Create a Data View

All you need here is a data view looking at Data Views (I love that this is a thing!). The main filter is only looking to see if there is an Id available. You’ll also need another layered filter group that leaves blank searches for Name and Description. See the image above for ours.

2. Create a Report

This part is completely up to you, as to what columns you’d like to see in the results. Ours pulls Name, Description, Link (Lava code below), Created Date Time, Last Date Ran, and Total Run Count. This helps us see if the existing data views are being used. We try to periodically clean up the data view inventory, and this tool is immensely helpful. Here’s a look at the link column, so you can go straight to the data view from the finder.

Here's the Link Lava code: <a href="{{ 'Global' | Attribute:'InternalApplicationRoot' }}/page/145?DataViewId={{ Id }}"><i class="fa fa-link"></i></a>

3. Create a Dynamic Report Page

Finally, create a page to hold the dynamic report. This part is straight forward. Simply add the Dynamic Report block to the page then set it up to use the report you just created - here’s our filter set up.

We used bootstrap in the Pre- and Post-HTML sections to format the filters and help make better use of the white space on the page. This provides the page with text inputs that allow end users to search for data views by key words in either the name or description of the data. Here’s an example of what the final product can look like.

One last enhancement we included was adding a link to this page on our Data View page menu. This is done with an HTML block.

Hopefully this tool helps your staff utilize Rock’s incredible data tools with more speed, efficiency, and organization.