Reports are a powerful feature of Landscape, but in order to be so versatile there had to be some complexity built in. Errors happen, even for experienced users. Here are some of the most common issues we see, and how to fix them:
"!Invalid..."
A very common error. You're attempting to access a field that isn't accessible by the report. This happens most often when you've assigned the report to one category ('Properties') but then are calling on a field from, for example, Stewardship Sites. This task is do-able, but requires some special workarounds (they're called Repeatable fields, and/or 'Sub-content Blocks'). Most of the time you just need to find the correct field from the category you're working within.
'Expression Expected'
Check to make sure the filters you have enabled are actually doing something. If not, or if the filter was turned on accidentally, turn it off. This could also be a result of a report not having access to the fields specified (see error #1).
If you're not sure what's causing an error, you can start to debug your report by eliminating elements one at a time and seeing if that fixes it. If the report runs after you've removed a block, you know at least that you need to address that block. If editing your report makes you nervous, you can always create a copy for experimenting and debugging purposes.
My report is taking forever to load!
If your report takes a long time to generate and the downloaded size of the report ends up being quite large (over 100MB) it's likely that your report contains a lot of high resolution photos. You can change the settings in your account so that reports don't generate at the highest resolution. Read more about photo storage and automatic resizing here.
My photos aren't showing up in order!
There are two sort fields available to photo blocks: Geography and Photo. The report will sort by Geography first, and then by Photo, because photos are contained within geography (ie. A photopoint can contain many photos). Make sure that the sort is being applied correctly. Experiment with different sort options until you achieve the desired result. It may make sense, for example, to sort by 'Created On' rather than 'Name'.
If you're still encountering errors, it may be because the number you may see associated with a point or photo is just a text field - either Map Label or Name. Since these are text fields, numbers are sorted as text. Which means 1, 10, 12, 123 etc., will be sorted with 1's, and 2, 21, 214, etc. will be sorted with 2's. You can get around this by making sure there are zeros before the digits (01, 02, 03, etc.). For more on ordering photos in reports, see this article.
How can I access and pull out the form data?
If you're not content with the Form Block, which presents a form in nice pre-programmed styling, but presents ALL of the form, you can access individual questions and display those. However, it takes some digging.
Since Forms are dynamic objects and the report template editor can only work with static fields, you can't pull out individual fields from the forms by using the merge fields button. You can, however, display those form parts as a repeatable field and then filter which questions to pull out. A repeatable block with a 'Form Parts' category will grab all of the fields and pull them in as repeated content. So, in the example below, the repeated block will cycle through the form and display the Title, Responses, Description, and Extra Text fields for each form question.
This report:
Looks like this:
Not too pretty, but you get the idea.
If I only want to display the answer for one question in my report, I can apply a filter so this:
Looks like this:
Alternatively, if you want to only print certain sections of your report, you can use the Question Filter setting in a form block to only merge certain form sections. More on that setting and form blocks in general in this article.
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