One more small issue about the Portal Activity Report that sometimes confuses or vexes users is that reports are displayed in GMT, and not in the time zone of the user or the server running the user. The short answer: that's simply the way it. 
One reason for this decision may be that it cannot be clear in what time zone to display the data. You could display it in the time zone of the server on which the iView runs, or in the time zone of the user running the iView. In the end, the decision was made to show the data in the GMT time zone -- the time zone in which the data is stored. There is no configuration option to alter this. NOTE: There have been cases where the selection of the hours for the report are understood to be in the time zone of the portal server, and are then converted to GMT when they are displayed. In other words, if you select 17:00 to 18:00 on a server located in Frankfurt, then the iView displays data for 16:00 to 17:00. This problem may be due to different operating systems or different databases, and it is under investigation.
How Data is Collected
A NetWeaver cluster may include nodes located in cities around the world. Events in each location are stored in the same database, and the event's time is converted to GMT. So when a user accesses an iView at 9 p.m. in Germany and a user accesses an iView at 10 p.m. in Israel, the events are both recorded as having happened at 8 p.m. GMT. All the data collected in the database is already converted to GMT. This part is easy. The way data is collected is documented on the Help Portal at Creating Portal Activity Report iViews .How Data is Displayed
Here is the vexing part for some. When you create an activity report iView, rows in an hourly reports are shown in GMT time. For example, if you create a report to show the "Current Day's Activity," you see the current day as if you were sitting in Greenwich, England. That is, you see midnight GMT to midnight GMT. The following shows the current day's activity for logged in users. One reason for this decision may be that it cannot be clear in what time zone to display the data. You could display it in the time zone of the server on which the iView runs, or in the time zone of the user running the iView. In the end, the decision was made to show the data in the GMT time zone -- the time zone in which the data is stored. There is no configuration option to alter this. NOTE: There have been cases where the selection of the hours for the report are understood to be in the time zone of the portal server, and are then converted to GMT when they are displayed. In other words, if you select 17:00 to 18:00 on a server located in Frankfurt, then the iView displays data for 16:00 to 17:00. This problem may be due to different operating systems or different databases, and it is under investigation. Empty Rows
Around about 2004 SP14, a change was made to only show rows that were non-zero. In the past, if you had an hourly report for the current day and there was no data, you would get a report with 24 rows showing 0 in each row. Now, you should get an empty report with no rows, and a line that says there is no data. Again, there may still be versions or bugs that cause rows with no data to display.
6 Comments
