Links to Features within ETO in Reports

Link, Feature, Report #results

Updated over a week ago

ETO Results reports can be a great way to direct users to TouchPoint responses, demographics pages, or really almost any feature in ETO that might require their attention. Doing so may require a bit of courage and some toying with formulas to get the links to work exactly as expected.

Instructions

Step 1 – Choose a page you want to link to. In this example, we will work through linking to a TouchPoint response based on the row of data in the report.

Step 2 – Navigate to the page you want to link to in ETO and right click the white space behind the elements on the page and click Properties. For this example, we will navigate to the View page for any single participant TouchPoint response.

Step 3 – Highlight the entire Address/URL from the Properties menu and copy it to your clipboard.

Step 4 – Paste the URL into a Word/notepad document. 

  • Most pages will have placeholders for dimensions like CLID (Participant Site Identifier), Response ID, Form ID (TouchPoint Unique ID), Name, etc. These placeholders are highlighted in the picture below. 

  •  The end of the URL from "&ReturnPage" controls where the user will land after clicking the Back button on the TouchPoint response page. The default return page can be changed by navigating to a particular TouchPoint response from different pages (eg. participant, staff, entity dashboard or View Participant TouchPoints) and copying the URL from that page and using it instead. 

  • Numbers do not have thousand comma separators. This will need to be adjusted in ETO Results, as the default display for numbers in Webi includes thousand comma separators.

Step 5 – Create the report that you want to link this page to. 

  •  Be sure to include each of the placeholders in the URL in the Results Objects. You will need to ensure that the row of data you are including the link in either explicitly or implicitly contains each placeholder object. 

  • For example, if you include Date Taken in your report but not Response ID and a particular participant has two responses on the same day, that row will not work implicitly with the URL.  This is because Response ID, which is necessary for this link to work, would be pulling from two possible values, as it is implied that there exists a MULTIVALUE error for Response ID here without the dimension being included in the table. Once including Response ID in the table, the row will separate into two distinct rows and the URL will work properly for both.  You can see this in action in the screenshots below with the responses associated with Date Taken 2/17/15.  TouchPoints that can only be completed once per participant would work without Response ID existing in the table because there will only be one possible Response ID value per row of participant data.

  • You may include dimensions like Response ID to appear as the clickable text in the URL, like we will in this example.

Step 6 – Create a new column that exists where you want the URL to exist.

Step 7 – Create a formula or variable that looks like the one below. 

  • You need to include everything that is not a Webi operator or dimension in quotation marks and 'add' the operators and dimensions between the strings using plus signs (see below).

  • When you are using numbers in a placeholder, you will need to format it to exclude commas using FormatNumber. 

  • There exists a target tab/page section. Target=\"_self\" works best for reports you are going to embed in a dashboard, as it will open in the same window that ETO is currently being used in. Target=\"_blank\" works best for reports that will be opened in a new tab or window, as it will open the response in a new tab or window. Be careful when using _blank when users with access to the report have access to multiple sites/programs, as the page will be opened in the site/program that the user is currently working in if security settings allow it to be opened there. For this reason, it is recommended that you only include links to pages where users can edit data in embedded reports

  • The last highlighted section in the URL (below) contains the display text for the URL. This text can contain a dimension, such as Response ID, or text in quotation marks (eg. "Click here").

  • For this example, I changed the ReturnPage to return to the Staff/My Dashboard. 

Step 8 – Save the variable and drag it into the blank column you created earlier. It will show as text instead of as a link.

Step 9 – Convert the link text to a clickable link by right clicking one of the cells in the link column and click Hyperlinks and then Read content as hyperlink.

Step 10 – Your table should now include a working, clickable link!

Summary

After performing all of these steps, you should have an ETO Results report that you and your end users can use to view and edit Participant Demographics, TouchPoint Responses, Dashboards, etc., all from an easy to read ETO Results Report or as an embedded report part. Please view the appended sub-page to view commonly used link formulas that might help you if you get stuck trying to create your own from a page in ETO.

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