Best Practice - Custom reports

Last update: December 20, 2023

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What is an Adobe Workfront “best practice”?

Best practices are guidelines that represent an effective, efficient course of action; are easily adopted by you and the users at your company; and can be replicated successfully across your organization.

As you review these recommendations, please keep in mind that some Workfront best practices are universal while others might be more specific to the topic. Use these best practices as a framework to help guide your Workfront system setups and use.

Navigating this page

As you scroll through this page, first you’ll find a high-level list of all the best practices for the topic. This allows you to review the recommendations without diving into the details of “why.”

The “Why are these best practices?” area, found after the high-level list, provides greater detail into some of the best practices and why they’re deemed as a process, tool, etc., you should consider implementing with your Workfront instance.

Custom reports best practices

  • Consider using report prompts to narrow down the results of a report, rather than building multiple, similar reports or creating complicated filter structures in a report.

  • Speed up report creation by copying a similar existing report to build your new report from.

  • Use user-based wildcards to create dynamic reports so the user viewing the report sees information relevant to them.

  • Create views that allow for in-line editing.

Why are these best practices?

Best practice

Consider using report prompts to narrow down the results of a report, rather than building multiple, similar reports or creating complicated filter structures in a report.

Here’s why

Cut down on the number of reports you need to build—and expand the use of the reports you do create—by including prompts, especially on the reports you run frequently.

Prompts allow you to make “in the moment” filter additions on a report without editing the report’s filter setups. For example, you have a report that finds tasks of a certain status that are assigned to a specific team. Add prompts to this “basic” report that allow you to narrow down the timeframe of the tasks’ due dates, see only tasks that have documents attached, or pinpoint tasks that have a particular custom form attached.

Note: Some users may find prompts confusing. If so, multiple reports with clear titles might be a better solution for them.

Best practice

Speed up report creation by copying a similar existing report to build your new report from.

Here’s why

Not only is this a time-saver, it ensures the new report contains the filters, views, or groupings that you need from the original report.

Best practice

Use user-based wildcards to create dynamic reports so the user viewing the report sees information relevant to them.

Here’s why

User-based wildcards make reports more flexible, allowing report writers to create a single report that can be shared with multiple users. Not only do user-based wildcards provide customized, personalized information for the logged-in user viewing the custom report, but it means you can reduce the number of reports that need to be created and maintained.

For instructions on how to use user-based wildcards in reports see Create filters with user-based wildcards.

Best practice

Create views that allow for in-line editing.

Here’s why

With in-line editing, users can change information about an item directly from a report or list. This is a time-saver because users don’t have to open the object to make changes or bounce from object to object when updating multiple items. Make sure users know that in-line editing is convenient and quick (two things that contribute to user adoption of Workfront).

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