Support team members often have to go back and forth between two separate reports to get the information they need to do their jobs.
They need the essential data from both the Incident and Problem tables combined into a single report.
Even though each report is based on a single table...
... both the Incident and Problem tables—and many others— are extended from the Task table.
That means they all contain fields inherited from the Task table.
To display data from both the Incident and Problem tables...
... we simply base the report on their parent table – The Task table.
In many cases, this can be an effective way to include data from fields that may not exist in different tables.
In our example, we’ll create a single report showing active incidents and problems of priority one or two.
We’re also going to display the Category field from the Incident table...
... and the Related incidents field from the Problem table.
Because these two fields don’t appear in the Task table...
... we must access them as fields on extended tables.
To start, we create our report here.
After we’ve given our report a name...
... we’ll choose Table as the source type and select the task table.
We can either click Next...
... or simply navigate to the next tab.
Here, we have many different visualization options...
… but for our report, the List view will do just fine.
On the configuration tab, we’ll select Task Type for the Group By field.
Clicking here, will run the report we just created.
And here it is.
Looking at this report, we see the tasks from the task table’s many different child tables.
So let’s add some conditions to get us closer to what we want.
The first condition will be Active is true.
We click and and designate the next condition as Task type...
... is...
... incident...
... or...
... Task type - Is - Problem.
And Run again.
And here’s our result.
This is much better, but we still want to isolate just our priority one and priority two records.
So let’s add a condition to only include incidents and problems that are priority one and priority two.
It looks like we are seeing exactly what we wanted.
When we expand the results, we can see that all the incidents and Problems’ priority is either one or two.
But our technical support team also wants the report to show the incident category and the number of related incidents for each problem.
However, those fields are not available in the task table.
They are unique to the Incident and Problem tables, respectively.
The admin user can set a UI property to display fields on extended tables in this Available list.
To do this, under the UI Properties…
… make sure that this property, to include extended table fields, is check-marked.
Back on our report...
... we now have access to a whole new set of fields in various tables extended from the task table...
... as seen here, in red.
There are five category fields, but they’re from different tables, as indicated in the brackets.
We want the Category field from the incident table…
… And the Related Incidents field from the Problem table.
We don’t need Task Type here since we are already grouping by task type, so let’s get rid of it.
Now, when we run the report...
... we see that for the incident records, the Category field is populated with data from the incident table…
…and no data on the Related Incidents field.
Because the incident record doesn’t have a related incidents field...
... there is no data to carry over.
Conversely, if we look at the related incidents field for our Problem tasks...
... we can see that there is data...
... while the Category field is empty.
Again, this is because the Problem record doesn’t have a Category field so there is no data to carry over.
We could also add the Workaround field...
... which would be very helpful for support team members that are working on problems.
But we’ll leave it, for now.
We’re almost done, but let’s do one more thing for this report.
Let’s add a filter on the incident severity field.
To do that we will need to create a new condition and dot-walk...
... which will allow us to access fields on related tables.
We select incident...
... and this icon lets us know we can dot-walk to a related table.
Now our report shows three incidents of high or medium severity.
But we’ve lost our problems.
That’s because the Incident Severity field doesn’t exist for Problems.
So let’s add another filter to account for an empty incident Severity field.
Now we have our problems back...
... and the technical support group has a single report to show what they should be working on.
We can now save our report which makes it available to share on a dashboard or with other users.
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