IQA for the Beginner

Friday, April 6, 20181:15 AM – 12:15 PM

Presenter:

Jon Guenther, MBA – President / Sales, Business Systems Consultants, Inc.

• Note: Before beginning this lesson, ensure that you have the group membership Reporting in your Credentials

Using IQA for Queries

Using an IQA

• Where to find IQA queries

• There are IQA queries specific to several modules in iMIS: Contacts, Prospects, Orders, Events, and Fundraising.

• Customer Search

• To use IQA to search for a customer, click on the Community tab, then click “Find Contacts”

• To find a person, enter the search criteria, then click Find

Finding contacts

Each Module has its own set of IQA’s

• You can also find Fundraising reports from the Continuum Tab by clicking Fundraising Reports

• Event reports can be found by clicking the Continuum tab and selecting Event Reports

• Queries can be exported to be formatted or printed out. You can export to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, PDF, Comma Separated Values and XML formats.

• Below are examples of a customer search exported to each of those formats:

Exporting Queries

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Excel

PDF

CSV – can be opened in notepad or excel

• To get to IQA click the Tools tab on the top menu bar

• From the RiSE Menu select Intelligent Query Architect, or click RiSE and select it from the left menu:

Creating Queries - Navigating the IQA Console

• The first thing you see is an organization of folders, similar to Windows Explorer.

Creating Queries - Navigating the IQA Console

Creating Queries - Navigating the IQA Console

The Organize menu allows you to maintain your objects in your folders

The New menu allows you to create a new folder or query

Edit allows you to make changes to your query or folder.

Import allows you to bring in a file from outside of iMIS (for example, a query you may have developed in your test database.)

Creating Queries - Navigating the IQA Console

The Organize menu allows you to maintain your objects in your folders

The New menu allows you to create a new folder or query

Edit allows you to make changes to your query or folder.

Import allows you to bring in a file from outside of iMIS (for example, a query you may have developed in your test database.)

Export allows you to save the file to be used in another program

• To create a new query, click New from the menu then select Query

• The New Query window opens, and status Define is highlighted. The first time you use IQA you will be in Basic mode.

• Summary Tab

• The Summary tab is where you’ll name your IQA query and give it a description. You must give your query a name before you can move to any other tab. Description is optional.

• Sources Tab

• The Sources Tab is where you’ll select the objects from which you’ll draw the data for your query.

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• When you click Add Source, the Document Browser window opens. You’ll notice it is similar to Windows Explorer. The objects on the top left are where you’ll draw your data. If you have been using Crystal Reports or Ad Hoc reports in iMIS, you may be used to using Tables. In IQA, you’ll use iMIS Business Objects (sometimes abbreviated iBO for short). These are objects that are connected to Views to the SQL tables in iMIS. The most common objects are CsContact and CsAddress. These are like the Name and Name_Address tables you may be used to. You select the objects for your query and click OK

Creating a query in Basic Mode

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• Filters tab

• The next tab is the Filters tab. You use this to tell IQA which data to pull. If you don’t use filters, it will pull every record in your database. In this example, the filter is WHERE Preferred Mail from the CsAddress object is true (or Yes) and Member Type from CsContact is equal to Individual Member. When each filter is entered, the + icon must be clicked to add the filter to the query. (Likewise, to remove a filter from the query, click the x icon.

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• Display Tab

• The next tab is the Display tab. From here we choose which fields to display in our query and the order we would like them to appear. By default, the View starts out with Selected. To see all the fields, change this to All

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• This will provide a list of fields (columns). Check the Display box for the fields you want in your query.

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• When you’ve selected all of your fields, you can either click Refresh, which will keep all fields available but put your selected fields at the top, or you can change the view to Selected, which will only show your selected fields. This example shows when the View is changed to Selected.

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• Next you can set the display order of your fields. When you have your order, click Refresh. In this example, the order will be set as follows:

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• Sorting tab

• The last tab is the Sorting tab. This is where you set the sort order of your records. This will be sorted on CsContact.Name(Last,First).

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• Saving and running your query

• Once the Sorting is finished, we can Run the query. But first, it’s a good idea to save the query (it can be saved before or after any of these steps once the query is given a name in the first step.) To save the query, click the Save icon in the upper right.

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• The first time you save, a window will open up allowing you to show where to save the query. There are some saving rules that will be discussed in a later lesson, but for now, we’ll save this query in the default folder $

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• Click OK at the bottom and your query is saved.

• To run the query, click Run in the left column

Creating a query in Basic Mode

• Your query will appear. Note in the upper left are icons for exporting your query. You can export to Word, Excel, PDF or CSV (comma separated values – allowing data to be used in other programs.)

Creating a query in Basic Mode

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