Making Reports Easier and Friendly - Lets work together

Hello all

I have been struggling with reports for the last few weeks , pretty simple reports. I feel that reporting needs a new overhaul similar to the UI one. This work would be focussed on trying to develop (unfortunately probably a new way) to get the openmrs data out for use

I know folks have used SAS and stata. Big implementers custom make their own reports in special modules. Small scale implementers continue to collect data but cannot extract it beyond using the good old mysqlworkbench. Lets share a simpler way of doing this moving forward

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Judy,

Thanks for highlighting this…I feel your pain.

The primary focus of development in the reporting module for at least the last few years has been on the API. When we have invested effort into the user interface, it has tended to be weighted towards the screens for running reports, rather in those for creating them. The reasons for this are many - I’d summarize them as a) magnitude and variability of definitions that can be configured and may need custom interfaces, b) limited developer capacity, c) divergence between the user interface between 1.x and 2.x applications, and d) the growth of the distribution in which more and more groups are authoring and publishing their reports in code, rather than through the UI.

The API is the strength of the reporting module, and I often refer to it as the “reporting framework” intentionally to try to convey this. I would advise against trying to re-imagine a reporting API unless we have some very clear opinions as to what that might mean.

As far as user-oriented tools built on top of the reporting framework, this is where things are sorely lacking. Many of us have ideas of what these might look like, but have not been able to complete them due to lack of time and priority. I have proposed a GSoC project for this summer to try to tackle this problem from one angle - by creating an htmlformentry-like syntax for authoring reports. Many of us have also started envisioning new versions of the Cohort Builder and Data Export Tool built on top of the reporting framework. And there is more and more discussion regarding data warehousing and how that fits into the conversation.

I for one would be very happy to be involved in any group effort to discuss, design, and re-imagine the available reporting tools moving forwards.

Thanks, Mike

If we could get a start on the little functionality that is possible on the reporting module , maybe we can see whats possible. For now - its amorphous and complex to even think of what we need to make it better

If we cant even select observations , and generate a row per patient report , i think we truly have a long way to go

I am happy to improve the documentation ,but its unclear on what is possible as everything i have tried just runs into errors

That being said do you have working SQL from the obs table