Customizing Fields in Classic Report Templates

You can change what fields appear in a Classic report by changing the fields specified in the report’s template. Fields must be specified in the templates using their internal identifier. This is usually different from their display name (which is used as the column header, the name displayed in a pane, and the name in the report).

Field names in the report template files are delimited by the characters “~~”. For example, ~~ReportTitle~~ appears in all of the x.Title report templates. In the Cross-Platform Client, whatever you type as the name of the report in the Reports dialog box becomes the title of the report.

Tip: To see all field display names, right-click the column header in the upper pane and choose Show Fields from the context menu.

Open the report template file in your favorite text editor.
Edit the file following standard HTML file conventions.
Save the file.
Note: If you want to create a new report template that has this new field, save the file with a new filename. All related report template files should be created with the same root filename.

For example, the TopicsSummary.Group1 template contains the following lines:

<TD WIDTH=450><FONT SIZE=”2”>~~Title~~</FONT></TD><TD WIDTH=0></TD>
<TD WIDTH=100><FONT SIZE=”2”>~~CreateUserID~~</FONT></TD><TD WIDTH=0></TD>
<TD WIDTH=120><FONT SIZE=”2”>~~CreatedTime~~</FONT></TD><TD WIDTH=0></TD>

If you wanted to add the Read Status field to this report, you would need to know that its internal identifier is ReadStatus. Then you might add the following line to the template:

<TD WIDTH=120><FONT SIZE=”2”>~~ReadStatus~~</FONT></TD><TD WIDTH=0></TD>

Remember that, even if you specify a field in a template, that field is skipped if it does not also appear as a column in the project view window’s upper pane. You might want to create filters for specific reports prior to creating the report.