Dynamic Widget URLS
Hello All!
I've seen similar conversations posted in the community before, but figured it might help with a focused control center group.
We heavily use dashboards as image widgets in dashboards to create buttons for our team to navigate. Often these image widgets have a URL shortcut when clicked on, which with SCC created templates uses the same URL. In our case, we have a "Daily Report" button that links to that project's specific daily report log (this saves our field team time from having to select a Project number from the list).
Unfortunately due to the way SCC uses the same link from the template, we have to go back and change the Form URL in the widget to link to the newly created templates. This severely limits us from being able to use SCC to update our dashboards, since we'd have to re-link these widgets every time.
Does anyone have any suggestions or insight on this? Thanks!
Answers
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We had almost the exact same scenario. We also have our technicians fill out Daily Job Reports. Here's what we did.
We created a Workspace called Master Reports and created a Daily Job Report Master Sheet. From there, we used Data Uploader to keep a current list of active projects in a drop down for people to select (this is probably optional). Then we use automation to take entries and automatically move the rows to different sheets for different regions. You might want to do this per PM or some other factor. This keeps our sheet cleaned up and moves the storage of the Daily Reports to where they need to be. Then in each project, we create a Report that looks at the Master Daily Report Sheets (the master sheet as well as all of the sheets the daily reports are sent to) and filters by job #. The only manual part of this now per project is changing the job # in the report builder to the current job#. We haven't found a way to automate this.
What we feel we've gained with this solution is that we now only have 1 form we have to send people to fill out daily reports, and we have a central repository that we can lookup using reports to find specific daily reports by project, by region, by PM, etc.
I hope this helps. If you have any questions or if I wasn't clear, please let me know.
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@David Tutwiler thanks for the reply! I can definitely see this as a decent workaround. We had originally tried this method but found that our human counterparts would mistype the project numbers which would cause some of our filtered reports to fail.
An alternate we tried exploring was one master sheet with the drop-down list of our projects that was used in conjunction with an automated workflow. Any new row added that matched a project would send it to that project's sheet. Unfortunately we had to maintain not only the drop down list, but create a new workflow filter every time a project was added :(
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Gotcha. Definitely see how that can be not worth the effort. We solved that issue by using Data Uploader. The process is a bit convoluted but it worked for us. Goes like this:
1) Set up a "Send as Attachment" from a sheet with all the project numbers on it
2) Set up a Zapier (or equivalent service) to automatically move that attachment into Google Drive (or OneDrive) when it hits the inbox
3) Use DataUploader to check that attachment at regular frequencies and update drop down boxes on all forms that need the Project number
Immediately cleaned up our reports.
As far as moving it to each project, I would think reports would be better for that so that you're not having to mess with workflows. We only move them by region and our project number is set up in a way where we can look at a few digits and tell which reason it goes to.
Sorry there isn't a straightforward way to handle it. That was the best I've got.
