Using the DotNetNuke Core Reports Module

By Andy Stephenson

July 2011

In this DotNetNuke training series we demonstrate some of the vast capabilities of the Core DNN Reports module.

The reports module is capable of producing virtually any report from your DotNetNuke database (and other data sources), and technically the capabilities are only limited by the SQL knowledge of the report designer.

We will walk you through step by step how to create some simple SQL queries and use simple HTML mark-up to create several useful and interesting reports, from here you will be able to expand on and adapt these reports to your site needs.

We create the following reports:

• A list of all tables and columns within the DotNetNuke Database
• A list of users and their last activity date
• The number of users per security role
• The keywords, description and site map priority of all public pages (with page view and page settings links)
• Number of pages (tabs) created per user with links to a list of pages created by a specific user.

The videos contain:

• Introduction
• Creating private report pages
• Installing the reports module
• Adding the reports module to a page
• Overview of report module settings
• How to create a report to display all the DotNetNuke database tables and columns
• Testing the SQL query
• Overview of the report view settings
• Running the report manually

Time length: 8min 44secs

• Create a user reports page
• About the DotNetNuke database table prefix
• Locating table and column names from your database schema
• How to create the SQL to ‘SELECT’ the needed tables and columns
• How to prepend column names with table names
• Instructing the database as to which main table to use
• How to join two tables together
• How to order results using ‘ORDER BY’
• Testing the query

Time length: 6min 44secs

• Creating the SEO report page
• Selecting the columns containing the SEO information
• Using table name shortcodes within your SQL queries
• How to give a useful title to each group of information
• Introduction to filtering the results within the SQL query
• How to find the portal ID for use within the query
• Selecting only public pages from the database
• Selecting only pages from a specific portal
• Ordering the results by site map priority

Time length: 5min 41secs

• Creating a blank HTML template visualizer
• Introduction to template visualizers
• How to add ‘tokens’ to display the report information within the template
• Saving the template
• How to allow the upload of HTML files to your DotNetNuke site
• Uploading the HTML template
• How to apply the template
• HTML template layout and styling

Time length: 5min 02secs

• Introduction to TabID’s and page URL’s
• Creating a clean, simple URL to use as a page link
• Creating the page link around the page token
• Inserting the TabID into the URL
• Testing the page links
• How to create an ‘edit page settings’ link for each result
• Creating the edit settings link within the template
• How to style the report results
• Adding a horizontal rule between each result

Time length: 5min 56secs

• Introduction to the report
• Creating the ‘content by user’ report
• How to use the COUNT command within the SQL query
• Testing the report
• Creating the secondary ‘content by specific user’ report
• Displaying all pages by the host user
• Testing the report

Time length: 5min 04secs

• Adding an ‘allowed url parameter’ to ‘content by specific user’ report
• Inserting the variable url parameter into the report query
• Testing the report by adding the url parameter into the address bar
• Creating an HTML template visualizer for the ‘content by user’ report
• How to create a table layout
• Adding the ‘pages’ and ‘name’ tokens into the table
• Creating the link to the secondary report
• How to send the UserID url parameter to the secondary report
• Applying the template
• Testing the report

Time length: 4min 52secs
Total time length:42min 03secs