Report Time Expression

As well as preparing reports for the last 'xx' hours of time (the default behaviour in the Reporting addon), there are other options you can use to set up the timing of your report.

A fixed start report operates on a locked starting date & time. These are used for 'to-date' reporting, such as year-to-date reports.

A 'dash' or negative time-span will mark the report as a fixed start report.

A fixed time report operates on a locked starting time, but varies the date. These are used for fixed time-window reports, such as morning and afternoon shift reporting.

Normally setting a report to generate every 6 hours from midnight would result in the report re-generating at 24:00, 6:00, 12:00, and 18:00.

But if the time-span starts with an exclamation mark (!) character, the report only includes the span immediately after the reference time.

For example, a time-span of '!8' and a reference date/time of “2024-01-01 11:00:00” will generate a report from 11:00 to 19:00. A new report won't be generated until the next day.

A calendar reference searches backwards in time for the last full span of a specific calendar value. This description is very difficult to understand without an example.

Most often, this is used to make monthly or weekly reports. Given part of the calendar value (ie. 'M' for the number of the month), it searches backwards from the current date until it sees the value change twice. The first time is the end of the period, the second time the start.

Use the '%' symbol - followed by the one of the symbols from the table below - to generate reports over calendar-based time-frames.

For example '%M' will provide a report for the previous calendar month.