Modifying Detail and Summary Reports

Products

• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

End users may be interested in updating and customizing the detail and summary reports in Service Desk.  This article discusses how to make such changes to the existing reporting forms.

Environment

Release : 17.1 and higher

Component : SERVICE DESK MANAGER

Cause

The following is a primer for modifying the internal Summary and Detail Reports within Service Desk. 

These changes will not have any impact on the Jasper based reporting provided in Insights.  Modifying Jasper reports is outside of the scope of this KB article.

Resolution

Detail and Summary reports are created on demand when one is viewing a list of objects or viewing a single object.  The reports do not rely on backend htmpl code nor can they be modified via Web Screen Painter.  Instead, one must update the corresponding rpt file that is used as a template to create the final report output.

Consider the Incident Detail Report, example shown here:

This report executes from the "indtl.rpt" file, which is mentioned in the above screencap at the the title page (file name highlighted in red).

To modify this file:

1. On the SDM Server, locate the given rpt file of interest, which is located in the SDM install directory's "fig/rpt" directory:
   
   
   
2. Copy the indtl.rpt file to the SDM install directory's site\mods\web_rpt directory. 
   
   
   
3. Edit the indtl.rpt file that was copied in the SDM install directory's site\mods\web_rpt directory.  You can use Notepad to edit the file.  
   
   
4. Make any changes of interest.  For illustrative purposes, we will change the following line, located around or at line 224:
   

         <td align=left width="20%" valign="top"><b>Requester:</b></td>

   This will be modified to read as:
   

         <td align=left width="20%" valign="top"><b>Requester TEST:</b></td>

5. Save the changes to indtl.rpt, then recycle SDM Services for the change to take effect.  Alternatively, you can also run pdm_webcache to clear the browser cache
   
   
6. Run the same Incident Detail Report.  The report will display the changes (highlighted in red):
   

Additional Information

The rpt files are basically a template which are used by Service Desk to generate the given reports.  Knowledge of HTML coding and SQL will be essential to successfully update the given files.

Please do not modify the given rpt files directly on the SDM install directory's fig/web_rpt directory.  This directory can be modified at any time by patch installs or updates and any modifications made may be overwritten.  Changes should be made on the copied versions of the files under site/mods.

As there is no concept of custom form groups for detail/summary reports, modification of the above reports will impact all users equally.  It is not possible, for instance, to have the Incident Detail Report display one way for users in the Administrator Role and another way for Level 1 Analysts.

This KB article is not intended to provide instruction for specific modifications to SDM reporting, both for Detail/Summary reports or Jasper reporting.  The above is an illustrative example of an approach that may be followed to perform such custom changes.

As with any customisations, Support is not permitted to assist in the development or troubleshooting of any custom changes that are made to Service Desk.