Setup Considerations: Report Designer
The solutions described in this section are not part of the Workday Service. See Legal Notice for details.
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Workday Report Designer. It explains:
- Why to set it up.
- How it fits into the rest of Workday.
- Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
- Security requirements and business process configurations.
- Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.
What It Is
Report Designer is a graphical tool for working with business form layouts. A business form layout is a specific design that you can apply to a PDF containing the results of a Workday report.
Many Workday-delivered reports have built-in business form layouts. You can use those existing layouts without reference to Report Designer. However, you do need Report Designer to customize them or to create your own from scratch for use with your custom reports.
Report Designer isn't available in your Workday tenant. It's a separate tool, based on the Eclipse platform. You must download and install the latest version of Workday Studio, before you can install Report Designer.
Business Benefits
Report Designer gives you control over the exact layout and composition of your Workday report PDFs. It enables you to tailor your presentation of Workday data to your exact business requirements.
You can use Report Designer to customize:
- Rich text formatting.
- Charts and graphs.
- Images and logos.
- Tables.
- Headers and footers.
- Page breaks.
Use Cases
There are 3 main scenarios in which you should use Report Designer:
- You want to override the existing business form layout for a Workday-delivered report.
- A Workday-delivered report doesn't have an existing business form layout and you want to create one.
- You want to create a business form layout for a custom report you've created in Workday.
Questions to Consider
Question | Considerations |
|---|---|
Do existing Workday report layouts meet my needs? | Report Designer is an entirely optional supplemental tool. If every Workday report you run has a business form layout that meets your needs, you don't need to use Report Designer. |
Do I have an existing Workday Studio installation? | Workday Studio is an integration-building tool. It contains a menu option that enables you to download Report Designer. However, you need to install the latest version of Workday Studio first. When the process is complete, Studio and Report Designer are separate perspectives in your Eclipse installation. |
Do I have a Java Development Kit installed? | Workday Studio requires a Java™ Development Kit (JDK) that's compatible with Java version 8. Install a suitable JDK before you can install Studio. And you must install Studio before you can install Report Designer. |
Recommendations
Although Report Designer is an application of the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Report Tools (BIRT) project, don't install the BIRT engine separately. The
Install Report Designer
option under Studio's Workday
menu provides everything you need.You can preview your report design PDFs in Report Designer, but you should always perform final testing in Workday.
Requirements
Before installing Report Designer, you must download and install Workday Studio. Studio requires a Java™ Development Kit (JDK) that's compatible with Java version 8.
Before using Report Designer, you must select
.rptdesign
as an allowed file type for uploading to Workday in the Edit Tenant Setup - System
task.Limitations
Report Designer can only work with Advanced custom reports. You can't base your design on multiple reports.
Tenant Setup
To use the custom layouts for Report Designer, you must override Workday-delivered layouts in the relevant functional area. You can find details in the Edit Tenant Setup topic for that functional area.
Security
To generate a PDF from a report, you must have security permission to view all of its fields, so self-service isn't always possible. Example: an Administrator might need to generate Compensation Statements because individual workers lack security for some of the relevant fields.
Business Processes
You can use a Report Designer custom layout in a Business Process as a part of a Report step.
Reporting
You can base your report design on any single Advanced custom report.
Integrations
You can use Report Designer custom layouts to create PDFs in Studio integrations.
Connections and Touchpoints
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.