Reporting

In addition to the AT's built-in reports, which may or may not be sufficient for repository statistics, there are a few options for generating customized reports. Common reporting software tie-ins that can be purchased include: Jasper Reports, Crystal Reports, and iReports. Those wishing to create or customize their own reports with these apps will also need to make use of the Toolkit’s application programming interface (API), which is available on the Archivists’ Toolkit website.

Another option for those with knowledge of MySQL is to use a free database administration tool such as Navicat for MySQL. The beauty of this application is that with a little MySQL you can query and batch edit data in the AT MySQL tables. A similar tool is DaDaBiIK, a free PHP application that allows you to easily create a highly customizable front-end for a database in order to search, insert, update and delete records. Although these tools allow you to easily batch edit data in the AT, be forewarned that editing in the tables directly is not tacitly approved and may cause problems when upgrading.

We ran into problems during the upgrade process to 1.5 after we had written data (including primary key values) directly to the tables. We think this is likely due to our creation of new data/values (especially primary keys) in the tables directly. Subsequent work utilizing these tools with data already imported into the AT via EAD and Accession (XML) import has not encountered problems.