How to create a tabular report with assignments

Creating a tabular report for your user stories or bugs with assigned users in Targetprocess is a bit more tricky than it may seem. The thing is, there could be several people assigned to a user story, so we would need a full many-to-many relation that we currently do not support in reports. Luckily, there is a work-around: using inner lists.

The process consists of the steps below:

1. Create, customize and save inner (child) report
2. Create and customize outer (parent) report
3. Embed first report as Inner list to the second one
4. Save outer report and run it

Most frequently used reports are Assignments per work item and Assignments per user.

Assignments per work item

Create Inner List

If you want to see a list of user stories along with people assigned to them, you need to create an inner (child) report with Assignment as a top level entity in advance.

This report is quite limited, but it still provides some basic information:

You may want to include user First Name, Last Name or other fields to have more details. Other properties are included into parent report, so there’s no need to duplicate them. Once you pick the columns, save the report.

Create Outer List

Now it is time to create your parent report, with User Story, Bug, or Assignable as a top level entity.

This report may include any columns or filters, of course.

What you need to do now is including child report you’ve created previously as an Inner List:

Press 'Save & Run' for the report, you will see somewhat like the following:

Assignments per user

To focus more on people rather than work, embed child report based on Assignable or Assignment to a parent report based on User as an Inner List.

This will bring you all assignments grouped per user:

Alternative: Export Views

Board and List views can be exported. Benefit of this method is that Assigmnents are exported as a column rather than as an inner list. On other side, loss is that it is not possible to customize columns in exported views and only first 1000 filtered items are exported. So it is up to you to choose what method to prefer.

Export option can be found under Actions menu on any View. Just click the Export button to download a .CSV file. No matter how many types of cards are shown on the View - all the cards from the View will be exported to the .CSV file.

Alternative: REST API integration with Excel

Exporting tabular reports to Microsoft Excel is a common practice. We, however, have a better option: REST API integration with Excel.

As an example, this simple REST query

https://youraccount.tpondemand.com/api/v1/UserStories?include=[Name,Assignments[Role[Name],GeneralUser[FirstName,LastName]]]

retrieves user stories with assignments into a XML file.

Here is how the XML file looks when being opened in Microsoft Excel:

Once data is exported to Excel, sky is the limit.

For more info, check our REST-Excel Integration Guide and REST API Getting Started Guide.