Using Document Bookmarking as a Powerful Ad-Hoc Reporting Tool

This month's Tech Tip describes how you can use Visual Intercept Web's bookmarking feature to produce reports that contain entirely ad-hoc sets of incidents or other documents. This use of the bookmarking feature is significant because these types of reports are very useful, but can be difficult or impossible to produce without a feature like document bookmarking.

Consider the following use case. You are the technical support manager for a software company. As the company prepares for a new release you have been asked to produce a report of the incidents that the technical support team would most like to have resolved. As you identify the incidents there is no property that they all have in common. The incidents are identified on the basis of a number of different considerations some of which may fairly subjective. So, based on how you are identifying the incidents there is no simple query that would allows you to group all of the incidents together to produce a report. You could write down the incident IDs and build a query in the Query Builder where all the IDs are set as values using the IN operator, e.g., WHERE Incident.IncidentID IN (2112, 2002, 3423,4456, 5673, etc…). However, this is obviously time consuming and much less efficient than you want it to be. If you were using a system other than Visual Intercept that has the selection criteria hard coded into the canned reports, this kind of report would be all but impossible.

However, by using Visual Intercept Web's bookmarking feature the solution is simple. As you identify each incident you want in the report simply use the bookmarking feature to add it to your bookmark list. Once you are finished simply go to the bookmark page, and print the report from there using the print icon. Using the bookmark feature this way is simple, but not always obvious. However, knowing how to use this feature this way can prevent a simple task from becoming a frustrating and time consuming chore.

If you have other questions about issues not included in or beyond the scope of this Tech Tip, please contact Elsinore Technical Support Services at or 866.866.0034, option 2.