Creating a New Data Source

You can create a new Data Source either as a part of the “Report Wizard” or as a separate process by using the “Data Source Wizard”. When you use the “Report Wizard,” the data source will be assigned the same name as the report.

Note: When creating or editing a datasource based on a professional panel, only one professional panel can be in the datasource, and the panel must have one or more BitStream variants (go to General for more information).

To use the Data Source Wizard:

1. Go to the Home > Data Source List menu command and click the New Data Source button in the toolbar, or click Data Source in the Create New column .



Figure 1 - Creating a new data source

The New Data Source window opens at step 1 .



Figure 2 - The New Data Source - Step 1 window

2. Type a name for the data source into the Data Source Name field.

Note: The Data Source name can be a maximum of 100 characters long.

If you wish to take the data from an external source, check the Use external data box.

3. Click Next.

The Step 2 page opens. If you have selected the Use External Data box, then a file browser dialog opens .



Figure 3 - The file upload properties dialog

4. Browse to and select the data files you wish to upload.

Important
The Triple-S Schema file must be either xml or zip, while the Triple-S Data file must be asc or zip.

5. Click Finish.

If the Use External Data box is not checked, then step 2 opens with list of the available projects .



Figure 4 - Step 2 in the procedure - searching for projects and panels

In the event the list is extensive, you can use the search criteria fields across the top of the list to narrow the search. The search list functionality is explained in Search Lists. You can search for projects in your “Favorites” list or in the list of all projects to which you have access. You can also search for panel projects.

6. Select the required project(s) and click Finish.

In both cases, the Edit Data Source page opens . This contains an overview of the projects in the data source. Note that you also access this page when you choose to edit an existing data source. You can therefore modify your data source at any time, add new projects, remove projects, and set up new relations.



Figure 5 - Example of the Edit Data Source page

7. To add more projects, select the project in the list and click the Add button (go to Adding Another Data Source to a Report for more information).

To remove projects from the Data Source, right-click the project in the Data Source tree and select Delete.

If you delete a project from the Data Source, everything that has been set up in the report for that data source (for example banners, recodings, text changes etc.) will be lost. Any new project that you may add to the Data Source will be given a different Data Source ID. In addition, tables that use variables from the deleted project will not function for the new project unless you manually set the Data Source ID on the new project to be the same as the id of the deleted project.

If a replacement project is almost identical to the one that has been deleted, you may wish to keep the content. In this case use Replace to replace a project in the data source. A dialog then appears giving you the option of keeping or discarding any changes that may have been made to banners, recodings, text etc (go to Duplicating a Report for more information). The new project will be given the Data Source ID of the old one.