Seeing the whole Table of Contents for a profile

by rocky

The Table of Contents is that stuff in the left nav – i.e. what reports are available to the WebTrends end user for that profile. You see the T-of-C every day. It’s made up of all the reports attached to the profile (for that template), organized as an expandable hierarchy. It’s sorta the same as the template but different — it’s the template when populated only with the reports that are attached to that particular profile.

It’s easy enough to use, but you really can only see a little chunk of it at a time.

And if you’re like us, you’ve rearranged it and added lots of custom reports to various chapters, so it’s definitely not the T-of-C that came out of the box.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see the Table of Contents all at once in document form? So you could, maybe, re-organize it? Check for completeness? Annotate it? Give it to the end user with annotations as part of orientation?

There is a way. You get it through the Scheduler, believe it or not. The entire Table of Contents (minus the dashboards and auto-populated folders, sadly) is available for copying and pasting when you set up a scheduled export.

Scheduler >> Scheduled Jobs >> New Job >> Scheduled Report. Pick the profile and so forth and continue the process with dummy names (sfdaklas is my favorite) until you get to the Reports window. At this point WebTrends shows you the entire Table of Contents, intending you to choose which reports to export. Instead, you click, drag, copy, paste into a Word document or whatever. Pasting as Unformatted Text gives nice indented results.

Having plundered Scheduler for what you want, cancel out.

Final step: submit a feature request to WebTrends to get this more easily in future products. See http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/2008/how-to-tell-webtrends-about-a-bug-or-a-change-youd-like/

There are probably other ways to get a print of the Table of Contents, but none come to mind. Let us know if you have one.

Postscript: The main deficiency here is that the auto-populated folders don’t show up, as I said before. If you have lots of custom reports that you’ve tucked into various chapters in your template, you’ll want to know if there are any that have been assigned to the profile but not assigned to a spot in the template. I know only one way to check, which is to edit the profile, go to the Summary screen, and grab the list of custom reports assigned to the profile. Cross-check it by hand with the Table of Contents.

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