Troubleshooting Query and Report Problems in eTapestry

Got a query or report that isn’t returning the correct results, and aren’t quite sure just where things got derailed? Did you set out to find all 2011 donations, and end up with a report that showed $0 Received for every donor? Never fear, these are some of the most common issues we see on a daily basis, and more often than not the solution is a simple one, if you know where to look. Here is a short list of things to check for if your query or report isn’t functioning quite the way you thought it would, with a couple of the common questions we regularly receive as guidance:

Q: Why is my query returning no results, when I know that there are accounts that meet the criteria?

These types of questions involve a little more investigating to troubleshoot, though there are a couple of items that you can check to get you started:

1. What is the Starting Criteria set to?

The Starting Criteria is essentially a pool of accounts or journal entries that you begin your query with, and it will always be another one of the queries within your database. As a default, every query you create from scratch will have a Starting Criteria of Base>All Constituents, with All Constituents being a standard eTapestry query that contains every constituent account in your database, meaning you are beginning your query with a pool of all constituents. Many users do not realize that the Starting Criteria is actually filtering their results before they have even added criteria to the query.

2. What is the Match of the query set to?

The Match determines whether an account or entry must meet all or any of the criteria you add to the query, so oftentimes an account will match all but 1 criterion within the query and therefore will get excluded. If your query is set to All of My Criteria and is missing a handful of accounts that you believe should be appearing in the results, a good rule of thumb is to work your way down the criteria you are using and make sure one of the missing accounts matches each one. This can usually point you in the right direction!

Q: Why is my report showing $0 Received for every account, when I know my query contains those that have given?

One of the most common query problems we encounter is also one of the easiest to fix; this issue is almost always caused by the Data Return Type of the query being set to Accounts, as opposed to Journal Entries. The Received field is one that is actually tracked on your journal entries within eTapestry, whether they are Gifts, Recurring Gifts, Pledge Payments, etc. If you build a query to pull in all 2011 donations, but set the Data Return Type to Accounts, then what you are actually receiving is just a list of accounts that donated within that year, instead of a list of donations. When you run the report, $0 is displayed for the Received field since that data is not tracked on the Accounts, but within the entries themselves. Simply switching the Data Return Type to Journal Entries and then re-running the report will take care of this issue in almost every case!

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