UMN Nanofabrication Center

Common Object Representation for Advanced Laboratories (Coral)

xReporter

What is xReporter

xReporter is a software package that can be used to create reports from database tables. We are using xReporter to create reports based upon the Oracle database used by Coral. These reports show information such as your equipment usage and charges. This tutorial is designed to help you get access to the reports available to you using xReporter so you can monitor your usage and charges.

Accounting Reports
Activity Reports
Other Reports

Re-establishing your remote Coral Password

Your remote Coral password is required to log-in to the xReporter www site. Prior to running xReporter, you may need to re-establish your remote Coral password using local Coral. This is done by logging in to local Coral using a Sunray appliance in one of the NFC labs, and from the Coral Equipment Client window, select the Window pull-down menu, and click on the Remote Password link. If you already have a remote Coral password, you do not need to change the password, simply re-enter the same one. The reason this needs to be done is because of differences in the encryption format. Once this is done, your remote Coral password will work with xReporter. Note that users with Coral accounts established after Jan 2005 should not need to do this step as their initial remote password will have the proper encryption.

Log-in to the xReporter www site

From a browser, navigate to the following www site:

http://hodur.ece.umn.edu:8080/cocoon/xreporter/en-US/datasources

The following window should appear:

If this window does not appear, then there may be a firewall issue. Contact the NFC office.

Next enter your Coral username and remote Coral password, then select the “Submit Query” button. The following screen should appear, indicating you have successfully logged in to the xReporter www site.

Next select the highlighted “Coral” in the phrase “Coral Production Coral Data”. The following window should appear for NFC users.

Report Options

Accounting Reports

The accounting report entitled “My Accounting” will show the total charges for a completed month of lab activity. The report only has data for months that are completed. The following screen capture shows the “My Accounting” report filled out correctly to show data for May, 2005, for all projects and accounts for which I have access. Note that the dates are 5/1/05 to 6/1/05. If you enter partial months, say 5/1/05 to 5/21/05, the resulting report will have no charges. Only full months are allowed. If you work on multiple projects, you can select which project you want. If you leave the project line blank, charges on all projects you have access to will be displayed. The “My Accounting” report does not provide the charges associated with each usage of process equipment. For detailed information on equipment usage, see the “My Activities” report.

Note that there are some options on the left side of the window related to how the report is displayed. The sort order can be changed, the columns re-configured, the report can be saved, etc. Also, the report can be exported in several formats to other programs for further analysis.

Here is an example of the actual report for user kburklan for this time period. Note that there are several types of activity that can be summarized. Equipment activity is used for all process equipment-related charges, reservations and staff labor are summarized on separate lines.

Activity Reports

The activity report entitled “My Activities” will show individual equipment usages, with enable/disable times. This is the report that should be monitored to make sure that your usage records in Coral are accurate, since this is the data used to develop the accounting reports. The information in the Accounting reports is used to charge your budget number. The “My Activities” window looks like this:

The “From Date” and “To Date” can be any dates (not limited to full months like the Accounting Reports). The “Agent” entry refers to situations where someone else does work for you (i.e. acts as an agent for you) and charges work to your budget. For example, if an NFC staff member does some wafer dicing for you, within the framework of Coral the staff member is acting as an agent for you and the charge for the wafer dicing saw usage will be charged to your project number, and the saw activity will be associated with you as the user. Normally you will be interested in all charges related to your work, so you will want to leave the “Agent” field blank to include everyone who may have acted as an agent for you. For the “Project” field entry, leave it blank to get a listing for all your projects, or enter the Coral project number if you are only interested in a specific project. The same idea holds for the Account field entry. For the “Item” field entry, the item refers to the Coral equipment name. If you want your activities on all equipment, leave the field blank, otherwise put in the Coral equipment name for which you are interested in seeing your activity. Lastly, the “Type” field entry can be left blank, resulting in the report showing charges associated with equipment activity (usage of process equipment), reservations, staff activity (NFC staff labor charges), and lab activity. Lab activity is simply a summary of your Coral log-in activity, and there are no actual charges related to this. It is only shown because at Stanford, where the report was set up, they do use lab activity for billing purposes. We do not, so you can disregard these lab activity entries. In summary, you will generally only need to fill in the “From Date” and “To Date” entries. Below is an example of a resulting report.

This report lists the activity for user jdiaz. Note that jdiaz is a remote user, meaning that all the work for him is done by someone else (listed as the agent).

NFC recommends that each user periodically check their equipment activity for accuracy, and report any issues to the NFC office or email to nfc@umn.edu.

Other Reports

There are a couple of other reports available concerning current status of the laboratory, such as who has a Coral session open, equipment that is currently enabled, and a listing of your reservations.