Dynamic Reports: The High Level Concepts

For those of you who are quick studies, I’ll lay out the general concepts here in bullet form, and we’ll dive into the details in subsequent posts.

Dynamic Reports (DR) is a Salesforce.com custom object, designed specifically to allow users to quickly launch commonly used reports, passing variables like User Name or Account Name to the reports.

The List View is the main user interface for Dynamic Reports.

• All links to reports are launched from the List View.
• All reports open in new browser tabs.
• You can make customized list views  (report launchers) for each “audience” of users.

Fields in the DR object are primarily 3 things:

• Variables that will be passed to reports,
• Variables that are used to filter List Views,
• Hyperlinks to reports.

Security

• Your role hierarchy, security model and data model are all enforced within Dynamic Reports.
• You should grant all users who will use DR’s access to the DR object and DR tab.
• All fields in DR should be viewable by all users.
• Primary access to specific List Views is managed in the Edit List View Screens.
• Your report folder security settings will impact whether your users can view the reports.
• I suggest creating new report folders for your DR’s, separate from your existing reports.

We’ll get into more details on the next couple posts!