Thingworx Native Reporting? Direct Access to Persistence Provider

[tsands]

Does Thingworx have native reporting functionality? Or, is it pretty much a mashup with a grid that needs to be printed?

Also, is there a direct connection to a persistence provider in order to query against the DBMS instead of the intermediary InfoTable functions?

[mhollenbach]

Ted,

To answer your first question I would like to understand better what you are trying to report and in what format you would like to report to? Are you trying to just report information visually, like in a Grid, or are you attempting to export information to a document outside of ThingWorx? We do have a Data Export Widget that allows you to export query results to an external document.

If you are using the JDBC connector to query an external database you can use direct SQL queries to a database such as SQL server, but if you are using the PostgreSQL version of ThingWorx and a PostgreSQL database you will most likely want to use the services provided on entities such as a DataTable or Stream to pull data out of the persistence provider.

Meghan

[tsands]

This is more of a generalized question in order to answer questions for stakeholders that are used to reporting with various summarizations and breaks - beyond a plain grid. If we have devices that are sold by a given sales person for a given region, it would be helpful to report on sales per region, sales per salesperson per region - with the appropriate summarizations. We could extract data in order to report on it in a separate system but wanted to know if there are any native reporting or report design capabilities within Thingworx or another available PTC product.

As for direct access to the underlying persistence provider, if we hosted it locally, we would have direct access. But, since PTC is hosting it in AWS, the question remains. If the answer is "NO", then, so be it.

[mhollenbach · Accepted solution]

ThingWorx doesn't come with any native reporting functionality, but you do have the ability to either write an extension that does exactly what you need or leverage the Data Export Widget to export data from a DataTable, Stream, etc. You could write a custom service that basically consumes the result set from a query on one of those data storage mechanisms and then constructs a modified result set that reports exactly what you need to see.

On a cloud hosted instance you would not have the ability to directly access the persistence provider.

Meghan