00:00:00 Introduction

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Alex Bertram coming to you from The Hague. We will wait just a minute for a few more people to register before we get started. Today we will walk through one of our new features: sharing and publishing reports. It will be a quick webinar to give you an idea of what you can do with this feature, followed by a Q&A session.

For today's demonstration, I am using real data pulled from the Humanitarian Data Exchange. We will be looking at a simple form containing a list of IDP sites in Nigeria. I have brought the latest round of data into ActivityInfo so we have actual data to work with.

00:01:41 Sharing reports

In today's webinar, we will cover what it means to share a report, look at publishing and how that differs from sharing, cover the permissions users need to perform these actions, and finally walk through embedding a published report in a website.

Let's look at our data. This is a list of sites in Nigeria organized by state and ward, including relevant characteristics. I have put together some simple reports, such as a chart breaking down the number of sites by state and the distribution between formal and informal IDP settlements. In this situation, you likely have colleagues working on data collection or others who need access to reports. You can now share this analysis via the sharing and publishing menu.

You can choose to share a report with other people based on their role. For example, if I choose the administrator role, anyone with that role will have access to the report. If I add a user with the Data Entry role, the report will appear in their list of reports with an indicator that it has been shared.

It is important to note that report sharing shares the report definition. The recipient must have access to the underlying data. If there are conditions on their access, such as being limited to a specific province, they will not see data outside of that scope. Sharing a report does not grant data access permissions. If a user receives a shared report, they cannot modify the original report definition, but they can save it as their own copy to make changes.

00:06:01 Permissions for sharing and publishing

Not everyone in the database has permission to share reports. If you have a large number of users, you may not want everyone sharing reports, as this can lead to a cluttered report list. If you go to your database settings, you will see that Administrators typically have permission to share and publish reports, but Read-only or Data Entry roles might not.

The database owner can modify these permissions in the Roles section by checking "Share reports." If you created a database before this feature was released, we did not automatically add this permission to the administrator role, so you may need to enable it manually. If you see a message stating "You do not have permission to share," you will need to contact your database owner.

00:09:23 Publishing reports

While sharing reports is about making definitions available to internal users with logins, publishing allows you to share the actual data with an outside audience. This is useful for program stakeholders or for sharing data broadly via a link. This feature is available from the publishing tab.

Publishing makes the data available to anyone on the internet who has the URL, so you must be careful if your database contains sensitive data. Publishing limits the exposed data to what is contained in the report; it does not publish the underlying data or hidden fields. Once published, you receive a standalone web page link that can be shared via email, allowing access without an ActivityInfo login. You also receive embeddable HTML code.

You need specific permissions to publish reports. The database owner must grant the "Publish reports" right to specific roles. An exception to this is if a form is already public; in that case, anyone with an ActivityInfo account can publish a report including that form. Be aware that pivot tables offer flexibility that could expose sensitive information, such as names of people, so ensure you only publish appropriate data.

00:19:45 Embedding a report in a website

We will now look at how to use the embeddable HTML. From the publishing tab, you can copy the provided HTML code. This is an iframe, similar to the code used to embed YouTube videos. You can use this with various website builders like Google Sites, Wix, or Strikingly.

For this example, I will use Google Sites. I can create a header and then use the embed block to paste the HTML code I copied from ActivityInfo. You can adjust the width and height to ensure the chart displays correctly. I can do the same with a table report, pasting the code to create a scrollable table within the website.

Published reports are updated automatically. If I make a change to the data in ActivityInfo—for example, changing the number of individuals in a specific camp—the data on the published website will update to reflect that change. This allows you to have a live feed from your ActivityInfo data on your program's website.

00:27:41 Q&A

Can we also publish geodata? We have just released the first part of our mapping functionality. You can now switch between a table and a map view to inspect data if your form has a geographic point field. In the short term, we will be adding a new report type to create and publish map reports.

Can we design the report using Power BI and link it with our live database? Yes, that is an option. You can go to "Export via the API" and select "Query JSON using a URL." You can copy and paste this URL into Power BI to build your dashboard there, keeping it linked directly to ActivityInfo.

How do you unpublish a report? If you go to your reports list, you can select the report and choose to unpublish it. If someone tries to access the URL after it has been unpublished, they will receive a message that the report is no longer available.

Can the GIS function pick more than one coordinate, like polygons for districts? Currently, the mapping feature supports points. We have a reference geodatabase available that includes polygon data for districts, which will show the center point. We are working on support for Geo Area fields to handle polygons more effectively in the future.