Design principles of reporting
Use reports for your Pega Platform™ application to keep data well-organized in a particular format as required by the executives in an organization. In addition to having an effective data model for effective reporting, as a Lead System Architect, focus on the basic principles of report design:
- Accuracy
- Consistency
- Efficiency
Accuracy
Accuracy in a report is achieved by carefully gathering the required data. Most reports require data from different sources or tables, so associate the different sources carefully.
For example, an organization wants to generate a medical beneficiary report. To gather data, you need to associate the following tables with each other:
- Employee
- Dependents
- Beneficiary enrollment
- Available benefits
If you join the Employee table directly with the Available benefits table without considering the beneficiary enrollment table, the medical beneficiary report cannot generate accurate results.
Ensure that you have an effective data model and a complete understanding of the relationship between the data types to create the required join conditions between the table. An effective data model is important for better reporting and scalability. For more information about data and relationships, see Data model design.
As an LSA, use sample data and evaluate the join conditions by analyzing the output before you create the actual report definition in the application.
Consistency
The data content of a report might change over time. As a best practice, maintain consistency according to the order and arrangement of the columns in the report. Changing column names and positions in new application releases can result in ambiguity, which might result in bad decision-making by executives of an organization.
Identify the report title, the columns, their order of arrangement, and the type of column before implementation. Focus on the type of chart once stakeholders finalize and approve the chart type, and keep its appearance (for example, colors and shades) consistent.
For example, a table with an Employee designation column that receives a new label of Employee job card can cause confusion and ambiguity if users of the report are unaware of the change.
Efficiency
Pega Platform includes two tools that you can use for report efficiency and maintain application performance: the Report Browser and Insights.
LSAs can think of providing access to the report filter criteria to business executives so that they can create more dynamic reports by changing filter criteria as and when required. Efficiency also counts performance, so consider using Elasticsearch or a reporting database wherever required.
For example, if you need a report with more filters, implement Elasticsearch by creating custom indexes.
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