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Recurring schedules & reporting (crystal reports)

Posted: Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:02 am
by hhhunter24
Hi all, greetings from South America.

I have recently installed and have been playing around with Timetrex for my company. So far i think its a really great software package and addresses the immediate needs of my company.

Let me first briefly describe my scenario.

I have been using Crystal Reports to do some custom reporting. Example, i'm able to run a report which displays Lateness, time-off, reported sick, etc per employee and per department. It took some digging around and manually linking tables in Crystal, but i managed to have this working.

My concern is this: I need to run this report at the end of every month. However, i noticed in the "AddRecurringScheduleShift.php" that it clears out schedules older than 1 week. The problem is ...... in my Lateness report, one of the criteria it searches for is an "exception_policy.type_id = S4" (which is triggered when an employee is punched in after his/her scheduled start time. If the recurring schedule is cleared out after 1 week and i run my lateness report at the end of the month, will the "S4" exception be also cleared since the schedule is deleted?

Would i still be able to report on past schedules? If not, is there a way to change the schedule clearing behavior?

Re: Recurring schedules & reporting (crystal reports)

Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2017 10:31 am
by shaunw
If you are connecting directly to the TimeTrex SQL database, you are doing it wrong and its not supported because of that. Instead you should be using the API (https://www.timetrex.com/workforce-management-api) which is specifically designed for such purposes and will save you a ton of time and headaches.

Additionally, in the Professional Edition of TimeTrex, it includes a plugin that allows it to be a direct data source for Crystal Reports without having to connect to use SQL at all, it only takes a couple minutes to get setup and running.

Re: Recurring schedules & reporting (crystal reports)

Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2017 1:36 pm
by hhhunter24
Thanks for the info Shaun.

I did connect using ODBC to the database and i got my reports to run using Crystal since our company has very specific reporting criteria. I was just wondering about the recurring schedule cleanup done by Timetrex.

Will look into your recommendations.

Cheers.