Using Report rules

Applies to JungleDocs for Office 365.
For a similar tutorial for JungleDocs for SharePoint 2010-2019, click here.

In this JungleDocs for Office 365 tutorial, you will learn:

  • What Report rules are
  • How to create Report rules
  • What configuration options there are for Report rules
  • How to run Report rules to create documents

What are Report rules?

Report rules let you export your selected, filtered or SharePoint list view items and document library metadata into documents. An example of a Report rule would be a sales report.

You could use Report rules for:

  • Reports (sales, legal etc.)
  • Invoices (by selecting products/services to include)
  • Meetings, calendar, agendas
  • Project summaries or reports
  • Document indexes
  • And many more...!

At EnovaPoint, we use Report rules to generate quotations, invoices, certificates and customer data reports.

Frequently asked: what's the difference between New & From Existing rules and Report rules? A rule of thumb to remember how these rules differ is that New & From Existing rules use multiple list items to create multiple documents, whereas Report rules use multiple items to create one document.


How to create a Report rule

To start creating reports with JungleDocs for Office 365 you will need to create a Report rule and a document template with content controls. In this document  template,  you will add a ReportItems content control. When running the Report rule, JungleDocs for Office 365 will populate the content control space with your selected or filtered SharePoint list items and document library metadata. The data can consist of table rows, paragraphs, entire tables or pages.

1. Open JungleDocs for Office 365 and go to the Reports tab.

2. Click New rule.

3. Configure the rule and click Save. This rule will now be available in the Reports tab.

In Modern UI

On the Reports tab, click Add new.


Configuration options

There are a number of options for configuring your Report rule. They are explained here.

Document target location

Select whether documents created using this Rule will be saved to a list or library or should be downloaded.

Load settings from another rule

Select this if you want to load settings from another rule. This makes it easier to create new rules.

Rule display name

Select a name for your new rule.

Select document template

Select the template you want to use for this new rule; edit an existing content type template or add a new custom template.
Learn more about creating document templates here.

Small Parts library location

Select the location of your Small Parts library if you want to use this feature. Small Parts let you merge different Word or PowerPoint files into your master template.
Learn more about Small Parts here.

Configure column automation (Smart Copy)

Decide what column values from the selected item(s) you want to copy or have inserted into the new document. Here you can configure exactly what data from which columns you want JungleDocs to export to the file which is created when you run the rule.

File naming

Configure the settings for document naming automation. With this feature, you can let JungleDocs set document names automatically based on metadata fields, text, sequence, date value etc. You can use this feature to streamline the naming process for all documents in your organisation and improve the overall usability of your SharePoint environment.
Read more about the best practices for document management in our blog series here.

Creation settings

Select Remove content controls & placeholders if you do not plan to update this document in the future. You also have the option to hide this rule from the list of rules displayed in the user interface. You can later re-enable the visibility from the Manage rules page.

If you select a SharePoint library as a target location, the creation settings will instead have the option the form that will allow you to change item or document metadata before saving it. 


How to run a Report rule

The following steps apply to both the classic JungleDocs for Office 365 and Modern UI.

1. Navigate to the list containing the items that you want to create a report on, and select the items.

2. Open JungleDocs for Office 365 from the ribbon and go the Reports tab.

3. Select a Report rule, then select Generate document.

The new document will be generated and stored on your SharePoint (or downloaded, depending on the rule settings).


Example

In this example, we want to export three SharePoint list items to a Word document. To export them you will select the items, open the app and run the Report rule. After you click the rule, JungleDocs for Office 365 will include each of the selected items to the ReportItems content control in the document template assigned to this rule.

Now JungleDocs for Office 365 will reuse the content control for each item you selected. For three selected items, the content control will be used three times. In this case, the result, if your content control was set on a table row, would be three rows. If it was set for a page with a page break, the output would be three separate pages.

You could use a template with a ReportItems content control to export the below list items (or a selection of them) to a Word document.

When running the rule you result would then look like this:

You might also be interested in our example case of creating a sales quote.

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.

Still need help? Contact Us Contact Us