Salesforce: Creating Salesforce Reports to Pull Simpplr Data

Simpplr is built on the Salesforce platform. Currently Simpplr's native analytics don't offer some metrics that customers commonly ask for; however, with a little Salesforce knowledge, you're able to get some important metrics from Salesforce that Simpplr currently doesn't offer. This article will walk you through the steps for creating a new report in Salesforce, adding report types, and some of the most common reports customers ask for. 

Use the table at the bottom of this article for the common report names, report types needed to run the report, and fields and filters required to be displayed in the report.

Note you will need System admin access in your Salesforce instance to create new report types and run some of these reports. We highly recommend having someone from your org who has experience in Salesforce help with creating these reports, as setting up report types and inputting data points to fetch can get a bit complicated. 

Table of Contents

Creating Reports

Report Names and Objects/Types Needed to Create Them

Creating Report Types

Creating Salesforce reports

Salesforce is a diverse tool, but for new users can be a bit complex. To get started running a report:

1. From the Salesforce Lightning dashboard your Simpplr instance is built on, click the Reports tab, then New Report.
   
   1. If you don't have a Reports tab visible, click the square made up of dots icon at the top left, then View All > Reports.
      
2. From the New Report menu, type the name/label of the report type you're looking for. Refer to the table at the bottom of this article for the report type names. If you created a custom report in Report Types, the name you assigned will be what you search for here. Select the name of the report, then Start Report.
   
3. Add the appropriate fields to the Columns section of your report. For example, in my Simpplr Site Roles report, I want to pull in the fields: User: Full Name, Site: Simpplr Site Name, Is Manager, Is Content Manager.
   
4. Click the Filters tab, and in Show me, choose the value that begins with "All..." depending on the data. Set your Created Date parameters how you'd like, then click Run.
   
   

Report Names and Objects/Types Needed to Create Them

Creating Report Types in Salesforce

What is a Report Type?

A report type defines which records and fields appear in your report.

If your required report type does not exist in the dropdown while creating a report (see previous section), you can follow these steps to create a custom report type:

Example: Creating a custom report type for ‘Active Simpplr Users’ report.

1. From the Salesforce home page, navigate to Setup, then in the Quick Find box, type Report Types and click.
   
2. Click New Custom Report Type and populate the fields as listed below (use the table at the bottom of this article to find the values you need for the specific report you're creating. What you see here is specific to the Active Users report we're creating for our example):
   1. Primary Object - Users
   2. Report Type Label - Users and Simpplr People
   3. Report Type Name will be auto-populated once you click on the next field
   4. Description - Users and Simpplr People
   5. Store in Category - Other Reports
   6. Deployment Status - Deployed
3. Once your values are input, click Next.
   
4. Click on Click to relate another object and select Simpplr People as the secondary object. Since the dropdown is a long list, you can type the text into the field to find the object more easily.
   
5. Click Save to save the changes.

You'll now be able to see this custom report type while creating the reports.