Absence of Data

+1000  I have multiple requests for this at any given point in time.  Our newest is to flag when a certain discussion hasn’t happened at a point when it should have.  Definitely spend a lot of time thinking through how to finagle the system to give me something that shows that - most of the time involving creating a new field on an MDA object and using a rule to populate it.   

Agreed! I’ve ran into this a lot recently as well. Data designer is great, but like you said, sometimes you don’t want to create too many duplicate data sources and clutter the MDA. 

Just a thought, but it almost seems like something like this could be achieved either through:

1. more formula options in report builder to allow for better querying capabilities, and/or,
2. implementing a concept of “temporary tables” or variables in report builder and/or data designer. this way you can perform more complex analytics for single use reports without having to build permanent data tables in the MDA

Hi Everyone,

If I understand your point @Kate , even if we make it real simple in Data Designer to do Absence of Data analysis, it wouldnt help you as much because:

• You can anyways join to get absence of data 
• It would clutter up data sources

One point → If we visually distinguish the objects created in Data designer, would that help you? 

Meanwhile, I will explore more with the team to see if we can do anything about regular absence of data usecases in Reporting directly. 

@rakesh I do think it would be great if we could visually distinguish objects created in Data designer. While this would be helpful, it essentially would only make it easier to navigate in the MDA, but ultimately you would still be creating too many objects just for the sake of reporting. In other words, that wouldn’t solve the issue of cluttering the MDA.

I really like using data designer. I think it has a much cleaner and simpler interface. I just don’t like the idea of always having to create a permanent dataset afterwards. especially when the only purpose is to check for the absence of data

1000% agree as well!

@darkknight you spoke my problem here!  I agree with this requirement 1000%.

We have the same requirement come up recently where we need to report on NA scorecards and assign CTAs. And creating Report when active SPs are also non existent. I have struggled to get this data out in one shot and had to merge multiple data sets.