Backlog Trend Reports

Content Options

The following options are available in the Content area for Backlog Trend reports:

Report Item Type
Indicates the application the report is based on.
Report Project
For reports based on primary tables, the project you select when creating a report determines which items are returned in your report. The project selection also determines where the report is stored and which users can access the report. For example, if you select Project A, only users who have privileges to run reports in Project A can run the report.

For details, refer to Selecting a Report Project.
Report Style
Choose to display your report as a tabular report or as an area chart, bar chart, horizontal bar chart, line chart, percentile stacked bar chart, scatter chart, stacked bar chart, or tape chart.

Consider the following information when you select a report style:
- For graphical reports, labels may be truncated for fields that contain long selection values.
- If you select a tape chart and your data set contains more than five items, the lines in the chart may appear as black.
Total By
Choose to increment results in days, weeks, months, or quarters. The date and time selected as a start date determines the beginning of the increment period. for example, if you specify Feb. 15 as a start date and select Quarters from the Increment drop-down list, report results are organized by quarter beginning with Feb. 15. For monthly increments, if you select a start date that does not apply to all months, such as Jan. 31, that date is only used when it applies. In addition, the specified end date is increased when needed to reflect an entire time period. If your last column starts at 3/30/2013 at 5 a.m. and you selected a monthly increment, the end date for the last column is 4/30/2013 at 5 a.m. For details on selecting start and end times for Trend reports, refer to Search Filter.
Start Date
This field is required; however, the time of day is optional. Either click the calendar icon to select a date, or enter a date specification using the format indicated below the input field.
End Date
This field is optional. If you do not specify an end date, the report uses the current date.
Group By
Optional. If you select a field by which to group items, one trend line appears for each value for that field that occurs within the results. For example, if you select the Submitter field, one trend line appears for each submitter of items returned by the query.
Show trend line for all items
Select this check box to display a trend line for all items in the project. This check box is only available for applications that contain the Submit Date system field.

Search Filter

Search filters enable you to narrow your search for items.

Important: When using search filters, remember that trend reports are based on the current values of the item. For example, if your report filters on Active items, and the report shows the following row for High Severity:

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Current Week
High Severity	3	4	4	5

If you close a currently active item that was submitted in Week 1, then the report will change as follows:

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Current Week
High Severity	2	3	3	4

Select the following options for creating a search filter for your report:

Option	Description
Include Items From Sub-projects	Select this check box to include items from sub-projects of the project selected from the Report Project list. This option is not available for reports created against auxiliary tables.
Show Search Filter In Results	Select this option to display your Search Filter settings in the output of the report. This option allows report viewers to see which filters are used in the report. It is also helpful when you select to print a report, since it displays which Query At Runtime parameters were selected.
Limit selections using field dependencies and project selections	Select this check box to use the project's field dependency rules. For example, in Project A, the Priority field has a dependency with the Severity field. The dependency states that when the Severity field is Critical, then the Priority field must be 1 or 2. You create a Details report on Project A and add a Search Specification of `Severity in Critical`. Then, you add a Search Specification for the Priority field. The available Field Values for the Priority field will be limited to 1 and 2. Note: Changing this setting does not affect values that have already been selected.
Basic Conditions	When you select a field from the Fields drop-down list, the Operator drop-down list contains values appropriate for that field, and the list box underneath the list of field values contains the possible values for that field. In some cases, you see a search icon, which you can use to filter the list of values. Select an operator, and then select the value or values that constitute your search criterion. Note: If there are arrow buttons and a second list box to hold field values, you can either use the arrow buttons to move values that you want in your criterion into the right-hand box, or you can multi-select the values in the left-hand box; however, do not use both mechanisms at once. Click OK to save your criterion.

Additional Options

The following options are available in the Additional Options area of the Backlog Trend report form.

Show Labels in Local Time
Select this check box if you want column labels to display times using your local time zone. Clear the check box if you want labels to show times in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).
Use Logarithmic Scale (Graphs only)
Select this check box to apply a logarithmic scale to your report. You may want to do this to reduce your report results to a manageable range if they cover a large range of values. This option only applies to certain report styles, such as line, scatter and bar charts.
Footer
Optionally, supply a footer for your report.
Note: The footer renders some common HTML tags such as <i>, <b>, and <font>. However, this means that character entity references such as >, <, ", and & are not encoded in the footer. Therefore, in order to display <Some Text> in the footer, you must send the following encoded sequence: <Some Text>.

Drill-Down Display Options

The following options are available in the Drill-Down Display Options area of the report form. They enable you to specify which fields to include in the drill-down reports as well as column widths and sorting criteria.

Note:

Drill-Down Display Options may not be available if your administrator has disabled Flash components or in browsers that do not support HTML5.
You cannot drill down into a report when it is contained in a Drill Through report and used to drive another report. See Drill Through Reports for more information.

The following table describes each of the fields that you use to specify drill-down display options:

Field	Description
Value Display Format	Select this check box to use the default columns for the drill-down report. Clear the check box to enable the Select Columns to Display feature.
Select Columns to Display	Select the fields that you want to appear as columns in the drill-down reports. To select or deselect a field, move it to or from the right-hand box using the arrow buttons.
Set Custom Field Widths	Optionally, specify the width (in pixels) for the columns in the drill-down reports.
Sorting	Select the fields on which you want to sort the data in the drill-down reports.

Results

Trend reports return a graphical representation the Backlog Trend of your report criteria.

The following information and options display with Backlog Trend report results.

Field	Description
Data Set Labels	For graphical reports, data set labels display for the report graphic. These labels use a color that corresponds to a category or column in the report.
Date/Time Labels	Labels for the date/time columns on the report depend on the time increment you reported on and whether you elected to display dates and times in local time or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). If you selected the Show Labels in Local Time check box on the report form, the local time zone specified in your user profile determines the column display. The heading for date/time labels indicates whether the report is using local time or UTC.

Field

Description

Data Set Labels

For graphical reports, data set labels display for the report graphic. These labels use a color that corresponds to a category or column in the report.

Date/Time Labels

Labels for the date/time columns on the report depend on the time increment you reported on and whether you elected to display dates and times in local time or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). If you selected the Show Labels in Local Time check box on the report form, the local time zone specified in your user profile determines the column display. The heading for date/time labels indicates whether the report is using local time or UTC.

Note:

The Backlog trend report is similar to a Custom trend report where you trend on the Active/Inactive field; however, there may be a slight difference in the results. The reason is that the two reports define open and closed in different ways.

The Active/Inactive custom trend uses each item's Change History to see when the item changed from active to inactive and from inactive to active. This change often occurs automatically as items move from active to inactive states and from inactive states to active states. The Active/Inactive field can also be changed manually by a user if the field is set as editable.

The Backlog trend report determines an item is open or closed by looking at how it moved from state to state in the past. It uses the current Active/Inactive setting on the state definition to determine if an item that was in that state a year ago was active or inactive at that time. This can lead to misleading categorization because state could have changed from being active to being inactive, or vice versa, during the past year. Also, the Backlog report does not take into account the possibility of manually altering the Active/Inactive field on individual items.