Dynamic report summaries in SAS Visual Analytics
Have you received an e-mail with a link to a report and have no idea what the report is about or what information it contains? Perhaps you get the same link once a week or month and you just don’t have time to keep accessing it to find out if action is required? Wouldn’t it be more effective if along with the link to the report you received an insightful summary? One that would quickly highlight any recent changes or key findings. Dynamic summaries are now available with SAS Visual Analytics using Apache Velocity syntax! Now report authors can include key findings in a summary for the report they are sharing. This summary can be previewed in SAS Drive, report distribution e-mails, in SAS Report Viewer and SAS Visual Analytics Apps. Because these report summaries, are easily read by screen readers they are beneficial for individuals with visual impairments.
Let’s look at how this would work.
Here we have a scrolling report that shows consumers with high water usage along with various water quality metrics over specified time frames. We are currently looking at the most recent data.
Under the report Options, when you scroll to the bottom, you will see a Summary box. This is where we’ll input our summary.
To start with we’ll just enter a simple summary of the report.
If we click on the Preview Summary we can see how this will appear in text as well as speech (for accessibility purposes).
This summary is ok, but it doesn’t provide any specifics about the numbers or results. Let’s add some metrics to our summary. I’ll add some additional text “The top water consumer is property”. Then I’ll click on the arrow under the Summary box so that I can click on the value I want to display from the report.
Example of elements or labels you can select: cells in a list table, bars in a bar chart, slices in a pie chart, axis labels and object titles. The references to data element values are based on the structure of the object. For example, if you select the first bar of a bar chart, then the summary always displays the value of the first bar in the bar chart.
One of the metrics I’d like to include in my report is the top water consumer, so I’ll use the bar chart located on the Benchmarking and Ranking tab of my report to select that value.
After clicking the arrow next to the Preview Summary button, I clicked on the top bar from the Top 10 Properties – Total bar chart and select Property Name so the name of the property appears.
If I had selected Total I could have the total water consumption displayed instead of the property name. SAS automatically created the reference for it in my summary. Because the reference to the data element values is based on the structure of the bar chart the value shown will always be the first bar in the chart. This means that next month if a different property becomes the top consumer it will be listed in the summary and not property 163.
If I click on Preview Summary this is what appears:
Even though our property number looks like a numerical value, it was formatted as a character. Let’s now look at how numerical values will appear.
Here is the Water Quality Monitoring section of the report:
Let’s add “The specific conductance at 6 feet of water this month is” and add the numerical value from our key value object.
After entering the text and clicking on the arrow, I’ll click on the specific conductance key value object in my report.
Here is what the summary looks like now:
Note: numbers are not formatted in the velocity template. If you want to just show the integer value we can use intValue(). You can also use the velocity template $NumberTool to format the number.
First, to make the code easier to write, let’s set a variable called foo (it can be any name) to equal our specific conductance key value. To do this we’ll type #set ($foo=["Current Specific Conductance Key Value"]["Specific Conductance 6ft"][0]), then we'll display our foo value but only the integer part and not the decimal value. To do that we'll add $foo.intValue() to our summary.
Note: make sure you use the arrow to select the specific conductance key value (the text italicized). Also, make sure there are no extra spaces in the text. The text should read #set ($foo=["Current Specific Conductance Key Value"]["Specific Conductance 6ft"][0])$foo.intValue()
The results are now this:
Did you notice that the key value object for specific conductance had a display rule applied to it (i.e. the number was red)? This means that the specific conductance was below its threshold (note: the lower the specific conductance the poorer the water quality is). To make this summary more valuable let’s provide an alert and warning text if the specific conductance falls within a certain range. To do this we’ll use the following Apache Velocity syntax.
#if( ["Current Specific Conductance Key Value"]["Specific Conductance 6ft"][0]< 216 ) **Alert! Specific Conductance is below threshold. Action Required.**
#elseif ( ["Current Specific Conductance Key Value"]["Specific Conductance 6ft"][0] >= 216 && ["Current Specific Conductance Key Value"]["Specific Conductance 6ft"][0] lt 232) Warning, Specific Conductance is getting close to threshold.
#end
Note: Notice how I used >= in one instance and lt in another. This was to show you that you can use either format.
This code will add the text "**Alert! Specific Conductance is below threshold. Action Required**" if the specific conductance is less than 216. But when the specific conductance is between 216 and 232 the text displayed will be: "Warning, Specific Conductance is getting close to threshold".
Let’s test out our syntax. Here we have our report that is showing a value of 202 (a number less than 216) for the specific conductance.
Clicking on the Preview Summary button shows us the speech text.
Now, let’s test out another condition of when the specific conductance is between 216 and 232.
To make the coding more manageable, we could use the variable that we defined in the beginning, foo, in place of the full syntax for the specific conductance value. Here is the same example but using foo.
So, now that we have a more insightful summary who gets to see it? One of the ways to see the summary is with the viewer (this is how most end users will access the report). From the viewer the user would select the More options menu and select Show summary.
This is what the summary will look like from the report viewer.
The summary can also be viewed in SAS Drive. From SAS Drive we’ll click on the Actions menu for the report then select Preview.
In Preview mode you’ll see the summary are the bottom of the screen. In our case, we’ll have to scroll through it.
Not only can you see these summaries in SAS Drive and the report viewer, but the end user will also see them when you e-mail the report or set up report distribution. When you distribute the report, you will see an option to include the summary or not.
I hope this blog has shown you how the dynamic summaries can provide valuable information to the end users. Have fun testing out different Apache Velocity syntax! Let me know what other fun things you can produce!
