I’ve been getting a lot of calls recently about a particular issue with Si 5.5 reporting. I should clarify it’s not exactly an ‘issue’ per se, (there is a very easy resolution – just not something most people know about!) So, I decided to post the resolution here on the blog to help everyone out.

Issue: When running a proposal report with filters applied using Phases your packages are removed from the report altogether. The reason for this is that in the D-Tools database, a package does not have a ‘phase’ rather the items inside the package are assigned to a phase in the database.

Resolution: This is very easy to fix and this must be completed on each machine running D-Tools.

1.  Open D-Tools and navigate to the Reports tab.
2.  On the Reports tab click on the ‘View/Change Global Settings’ button

3.  This will bring up this dialog box:

4.  Set the Prefilter Items option = True

Explanation: Setting this setting = True will cause all of the items in your project to have filters applied to them in advance (on the back end) so that when you do run a report with filters applied, those items residing in packages will filter appropriately.

For example if I have a package with Rough-In, Trim and Finish items inside, and I run a report for Phase = Rough-In only, the package will now show up in my report with only the Rough-In items included in the report.  Without the prefilter items option enables as true, the entire package would have been excluded from the report.

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