• Custom Report Improvements

I have a client who uses the Custom Reports extensively to track and manage form submissions (Contacts and Cases) as well as purchases (Contacts and Orders). They’ve pointed out two things that would be a big improvement for them:

1. Add a search bar to the Custom Reports area so you can search reports without paging through them all. This client has created over 100 reports that they use on a regular basis. If they could search for a report rather than scrolling through the list it would be a big time saver. Alternatively, if the “items per page” at the bottom of the list could have a “100”, “200” or an “all” option rather than being limited to a max of 50 per page, that would be helpful. This same feature would also be helpful in the other item lists throughout the site (Contacts, Orders, Forms, etc.) — although all of those do have a search bar so they are more manageable than Custom Reports.

2. The “Contacts and Cases” report type would be more useful if it could pull information from more than one form OR if it could pull CRM records that were not included in the form. For example, we often use Advanced CRM Groups to pull information from a form submission into the CRM record (or to manually enter custom information into a CRM record on the back end). If a person submits a form that stores an Advanced CRM Field and then later submits another form, a report on the second form will not pull in the information that had been previously saved in the Advanced CRM record. Likewise, if we manually enter information into an Advanced record, the report will not show the information (even though we have the ability to select the Advanced CRM field in the “Add Fields” step when building the report).

In other words, some of the CRM fields that you can choose when building a report (in my example, the Advanced CRM fields) are pulling data only from the form that I’m running the report on, not from the CRM database. While other fields such as “First Name” and “Last Name” are being pulled directly from the CRM. This is related to another backlog request here: Custom Reports to use FormSubmissionData for system fields

As stated at the beginning of my request, one solution to this problem would be to allow for running reports on multiple forms (although this would not solve the issue in the case that we manually enter Advanced CRM information). So the better solution would probably be something similar to what was suggested in the other forum post that I linked to above — which is the ability to select whether you want to pull data from the current CRM fields or from the form submission fields when running a report.

One more thing — the Form Filter dropdown menu that allows you to select which form you want to use for your Custom Report puts the list of forms in some strange order. I’m not sure what the ordering is based on (it isn’t last modified, because I tested that), but it would be much better if it were alphabetical. With 100+ forms, I have to scroll through all of them to find the one I want — and in a randomly ordered list, that can be a bit frustrating.