I recently got a chance to quickly play around with the Create Report button or Query Based Reports (QBR) in Maximo 7.  At first look, creating a QBR report can be a bit daunting, but it’s actually quite easy to use.  This feature is very powerful useful feature to have in your reporting arsenal.

When you first click on the button to create a report, the process of picking columns of data is pretty straight forward.  If you are in the Work Order Tracking module, you can pick any available field you want from the workorder table.  You can pick fields such as wonum, location, assetnum, and description (work order description).  If you wanted to get the description of a child object such as the description on an asset, you would first click on the “Asset Details” in the tree, then select the description field from the “Available Fields” table.  Once you add it to the report, you will see that the “category” of the field is categorized by “Asset Details” as opposed to “Work Order Tracking”.  This is how you pick child object fields to be displayed in the report.  You can do the same for locations.  Another great feature, is that you can also group and sort by certain fields.  You are only limited to two for grouping and two for sorting, but how many do you really need for doing quick reports?  You can choose to run the report immediately or schedule it to run at a later time and emailed to someone or save the report for future use.

One feature I would also like to comment on is the “Apply the Current Query and Filter from the Application?” check box.  This check box to me was a bit misleading at first.  What I thought it meant, was that it would take your current query (whatever it may be) and use that dynamic query every time you ran the report, but what it actually does (if you have the check box checked), is take your current query and hard code it into the report.  So let’s say your current query was to look for all workorders for site “BEDFORD”.  If you created a report with this check box checked and saved it for later use, the query behind the report will always query for workorders for site “BEDFORD”.  Now let’s say you changed your filter to find workorders for site “WAKEFIELD” and you ran this saved report.  The report would still show all the workorders from site “BEDFORD” even though your current query states something different.  Now in order to dynamically pull the current query into the report, you have to uncheck the “Apply the Current Query and Filter from the Application?” check box.  This will ensure that whatever your current query is, it will be used the the report.