Build Your Own Ekahau Custom Report Templates

...well

I am creating a Deep Dive session that I will present at WLPC Phoenix 2020 to address this very question. It is my intention that the Deep Dive will equip the attendees with a basic working knowledge of JSON, the Report Template creation workflow, break and fix testing and greater understanding of the interplay between Ekahau Pro and MS Word.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal"

It may or may not have been Pablo Picasso who first voiced this idea.

Over the past 4-5 years I have created report templates for myself and assisted many Ekahau Customers with their own report templates. As a by-product of this, I have a large collection of "example" report templates. These are a great place to start experimenting, I invite you download the back catalogue. You can access my Google Drive folder using this link:

https://rebrand.ly/report-templates

What’s the secret to custom report template creation?

Start with an example of the desired output

• Build your template with a specific output goal

Read the documentation

• https://support.ekahau.com/Template-Reporting
• Skim read these pages before you get started so that you gain a feel for the tags that exist and the data types you can extract from an Ekahau project file
• As a general rule, if data is accessible within Ekahau Pro, it is probable that it can also be extracted via report template tags. (Caveat: But not always)

Use Ekahau Pro to generate (or confirm) the tags you need

Within Ekahau Pro:
Reporting > Template Reporting > Copy Current Visualisation Template Tags to Clipboard

• You can grab the tags that make up the current visualisation
• The Ekahau support pages form the central point of reference regarding the available tags, what they do, which tags that have been retired, etc...
• Ekahau Pro will tell you what tags are in use to generate the visualisations within the application.

If your project is large, work with a "relevant" smaller data set

• When constructing and testing your template, there will be a great deal of iteration.
• Work with smaller project files so that you reduce time spent waiting for the report to be created
• It may be advantageous to create separate report templates for simulation and survey data

I am a big fan of the reporting functionality offered by Ekahau Pro. Before I worked for Ekahau the company I was working for tasked me with creating a "company wide" template for all (most) project reporting. At this time we did not use Ekahau for Wi-Fi design or survey. I discovered that it was not easy! It would have required the purchase of additional software, in the end, nothing came of my efforts in this direction. A year or so later when I began using Ekahau as my design and survey tool, I was blown away by the flexibility offered by the custom report template functionality.

Should you wish to contact me regarding report templates please contact me.