What is Summarization?

When you use FinancialForce Reporting, summarization allows you to condense data into a custom object which can then be the basis of a dataview and inquired on using action views. Condensing data in this way means that, although you are not viewing live data, action views perform faster because less data is loaded.

Notes:
  • Configuring summarization should be the responsibility of technical users with a good understanding of the structure of your Salesforce data. If you do not have system administrator permissions, you may not be able to save a summarization template if it references restricted fields.
  • In FinancialForce Reporting V6 and later, if your action view uses summarization, you must rebuild your summarization template before you use the data in the action view. Otherwise, you receive an error message.

A summarization template allows you to configure details for condensing data using the summarization process. See What is a Summarization Template? for more information.

The summarization process reads the field mappings defined on the summarization template and applies the selection rule to build the summarized data which is then stored on the summarization object. How Data is Summarized for more information about how your source data is summarized.

Warning: When you create your summarization template, you must set field-level security on the destination object. This ensures that field-level security that you have on the source also applies to the destination. Otherwise, users may have access to data that they should not have.

The summarization process runs as a batch job and you are notified by email once it has completed. If necessary you can schedule the process to run overnight when user activity on your org is low. The date and time when data was summarized is stored so that when running action views users can see how recent the data is.

You start the summarization process by clicking the Save and Build button on your chosen summarization template.

The summarization object is the object that stores the summarized data (the output from the summarization process). The Available Summarization Objects tab lists all available summarization objects in your org. Any summarization custom objects must be added to this list. See Adding a Summarization Custom Object.

The Summarization object can hold data generated from multiple summarization templates. Each time you re-build a template, the previous version of the data generated from that template is deleted once the latest version has been built (so only the latest version is stored). You can also purge data stored for a particular summarization template if you no longer need it.

You can build reports on the summarization object in the same way as you build reports on other objects.