AdvoLogix and the Force.com platform offer a powerful suite of analytic tools to help you view and analyze your data. This topic introduces the parts and explains how they work together.
Custom List Views
List views give you instant access to specific sets of data. In addition to using the existing views, you can easily create custom views for the items most relevant to you.
Reports
A report returns a set of records that meets certain criteria, and displays it in organized rows and columns. Report data can be filtered, grouped, and displayed graphically as a chart. Reports are stored in folders, which control who has access.
Folders
A folder is a place where you can store reports, dashboards, documents, or email templates. Folders can be public, hidden, or shared, and can be set to read-only or read/write. You control who has access to its contents based on roles, permissions, public groups, and license types. You can make a folder available to your entire organization, or make it private so that only the owner has access.
Custom Report Types
A report type defines the set of records and fields available to a report based on the relationships between a primary object and its related objects. Reports display only records that meet the criteria defined in the report type. The platform provides a set of pre-defined standard report types; administrators can create custom report types as well.
Dashboards
A dashboard shows data from source reports as visual components, which can be charts, gauges, tables, metrics, or Visualforce pages. The components provide a snapshot of key metrics and performance indicators for your organization. Each dashboard can have up to 20 components. Administrators control access to dashboards by storing them in folders with certain visibility settings. Dashboard folders can be public, hidden, or restricted to groups, roles, or territories. If you have access to a folder, you can view its dashboards. To view a dashboard component, users need access to the folder for the underlying source report. Follow a dashboard to get updates about the dashboard posted to your feed.
Each dashboard has a running user, whose security settings determine which data to display in a dashboard. If the running user is a specific user, all dashboard viewers see data based on the security settings of that user, regardless of their own personal security settings. For dynamic dashboards, you can set the running user to be the logged-in user, so that each user sees the dashboard according to his or her own access level.
Analytic Snapshots
An analytic snapshot lets you report on historical data. Authorized users can save tabular or summary report results to fields on a custom object, then map those fields to corresponding fields on a target object. They can then schedule when to run the report to load the custom object's fields with the report's data. Analytic snapshots enable you to work with report data similarly to how you work with other records.