Cool admin utility – Display your custom report configs in Excel

Applies to:  Software

We haven’t been posting much because we have no time and no life.  The day job is 110% overwhelming us. 

But one thing that has saved a lot of time in the past few weeks has been being able to see all the configuration settings for our many custom reports.  In one big mad spreadsheet.  Since we have 1,297 custom reports at the moment, it helps.

Just to give you a glimpse of our daily life expressed as a spreadsheet, here’s our listing, in three columns and shrunk to about a jillionth of legible size.  No you can’t magnify it.  But read The Outsider for what we consider to be the best and brightest.

You can have one of these too, floor-to-ceiling if you wish.  Attached to this post is a quick and dirty (actually, somewhat slow and dirty) cscript that parses through all your WebTrends configuration files, or .ini files, and creates a tab-delimited text file with all the settings for all your custom reports.  It shows the name of each custom report, its GUID, and it looks up all the filter and dimension GUIDs and displays their names.  It was written by Mister Peabody who plans to polish it up some day, unless WebTrends Inc provides us with something slicker and better.

The tab-delimited file the script produces can be opened with Excel, producing a spreadsheet with these columns:

• Ini Section:  this column shows the section heading within the original config file, should you want to open the config file and find the report’s raw configurations quickly.  You’ll probably never use the information in this column.
• Report Name:  the name or title of the report.
• Report GUID:  the GUID or ID number assigned to the report by WebTrends and used internally by WebTrends.  It’s listed here because if you open a profile .wlp file, you’ll see only GUIDs for custom reports..
• Profile Category:  if you assigned the report to a WebTrends custom category, the category name appears in this column.
• Dimension 1:  the name of the report’s first or primary dimension, with the dimension’s GUID in case you ever want to look it up in the original ini file.  Also, the dimension information is annotated as to whether it’s a hit dimension or visit dimension, according to WebTrends, but only for custom dimensions you’ve created.  Out-of-the-box dimensions are identified as such (”OOTB”) but the config files provide no information about visits-vs-hit basis, so the output doesn’t show it.
• Dimension 2:  Same as above, but for the second or secondary dimension, if there is one.   
• Exclude Filters:  names of all Exclude filters applied to the report.  They will be marked ”hit” or “visit” depending on their basis.
• Include Filters: names of all Exclude filters applied to the report.  They will be marked ”hit” or “visit” depending on their basis.

Rightclick here and Save To Disk to get the “Dump of WebTrends Custom Report Configurations” script.

Here’s how to use this little script once you have it.   

1. Remove the “txt” filename extension
2. Edit the line that defines the location of the configuration files.  If your configuration files are in the default location and your program is in the default location, all you have to do is replace “X:” with the drive letter
3. Put the file somewhere accessible, like the root of the drive where WebTrends is installed
4. Browse to it with Windows Explorer and double click on it
5. Wait – it can take a while.

Details

• If a cell contains more than one configuration setting (for example, if the report has multiple filters), you’ll see all of them together in one cell, but each will be separated by a pipe character (vertical line |).  You can neaten up these cells by turning the pipes into within-cell line breaks, i.e. turn them into a list inside the cell.  Here’s how to do this for all of them at once:  do a global search and replace where “|” is replaced by Alt-0010 (that’s “hold down the Alt key and press – ON THE NUMERIC KEYPAD NOT ON THE ALPHA KEYPAD – zero zero one zero”).  Onscreen it will look like you’re going to replace the pipe with nothing, but Alt-0010 is an invisible “within-cell-line-break” character.
• Excel 2007 can handle cells with a lot of text, i.e. a lot of filter names.  Excel 2003 … not so much.
• If you look at the script code you’ll see that it’s fairly repetitive and adaptable.  That means we’ll use it for other similar functions in the future.  Watch this space.   But, remember, we’re just tossing it out there.  We don’t support or warranty it.
• Meanwhile, if you can improve it or replace it with something better, PLEASE DO. 
• If you have more than 1,297 different custom reports, let’s hear about it!

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