BIRT example two: the IXIASOFT CCMS data source

After the data source is generated, you can open the file in any spreadsheet application and look at it.

With the TSV file open in the spreadsheet application, we can see the contents of the first two columns:
  • The first column contains all the months when documents were promoted. This is the year-month portion of the Authored Stamp.
  • The second column shows the users who performed the promotions in that month.
As you’d expect, there are months when several writers are promoting their documents into review: rows 6 and 7, for example.

The auto-generated columns

The Document Count and Values Count columns are auto-generated for any grouping query

The Document Count column shows the number of documents returned by the combined grouping criteria of the first two columns (columns A and B). In this case it's the number of documents that were promoted in any given month by each writer.

The Values Count, however, is where things get interesting. This column reflects the number of times that the documents were promoted into the review cycle. (It counts the number of dates in the stamp.)

In some months (for some writers) the number is the same. In row 5, for example, you can see that 33 documents went into review 33 times. Basically, they’re going into review and they’re not coming back. Row 2 shows a values count of 27 and a document count of 26 – one of the documents went through a second time. Nothing unusual about that.

But if you look at row 11 you can see that in this month, writer Jones sent 97 documents into review and all them went through a second time; if not a third. This could be caused by a variety of reasons – Jones might be a new writer, or is dealing with particularly difficult subject material, or is simply overloaded with work. But it pinpoints a possible area of difficulty and lets you address it.

BIRT example two: the data source