Your first report — the Composer tour and a full save
Where the building work happens. The Composer is one screen with three panes — pick your fields on the left, see your dataset shape in the middle, preview live data on the right. By the end of this lesson, your first saved report is in the library and the rest of Module 7 stops being abstract.
By the end of this lesson
- A first report saved to the library, ready to refine in later lessons
- Comfortable with the three-pane Composer layout and the Save dialog
You'll need
- Composer role on at least one app — see Roles & permissions if your app list is empty
- A folder you can save to, or use your Private library (everyone has one)
Background
This is the orientation lesson for Module 7 — the Composer role, the Composer page itself, and a full first-report walkthrough. The video runs about six minutes; the rest of this page anchors what you saw and previews where the next lessons take you.
Two ideas to anchor before the click-by-click:
- App and Category. An app is a connected data source — your App Builder set it up in Module 2. A category is a subject-area inside the app. One app can have several: an Academy app might have
TicketsandFinance; a Sales app might haveOrdersandCustomers. Every report begins by picking one app + one category. - The three-pane layout. Once an app/category is picked, the page splits into three columns: Select Fields (the report tree of available fields), Selected Data (the columns you've picked, as cards), and Preview (live data showing the top 50 rows). Every action updates the preview immediately.
The three panes — at a glance
Where this lesson sits in Module 7
This lesson gets you to a saved report. The next five take the same report through every refinement technique Composer offers:
You'll use one report — the one you save in this lesson — as the running example through the next four. By the end of the module, the same report has filters, calculated columns, and click-through navigation.
One last orientation note before the click-by-click: the top-right toolbar across every Composer page has the same actions in the same place — the three-dot menu (settings and configuration), Data Prep (the finishing-touches tools covered in Lesson 5), Config (report-level options), Visualizations (chart and grid setup, covered in Module 8), and View Full Document (run the full query, not just the top-50 preview). You'll use the last one in this lesson; the others come later.
Stuck getting into Composer or finding your app? Email team@dashboardfox.com. Real human, same business day.
Do it
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Open Composer and pick an app + category
From the left sidebar, click the Composer icon (the stacked-layers icon). The page lands blank with one prompt at top: "Select an App and Category." Click the dropdown.
You'll see your apps listed. An app is a connected data source — Postgres, Snowflake, an Excel import, a SaaS API — whatever your admin set up in Module 2. Click an app, and its categories appear. A category is a subject-area inside the app: in an Academy app you might have
TicketsandFinance; in a Sales app you might haveOrdersandCustomers.Pick a category. The page rearranges into the three-pane layout, and the header at top now shows
App: AcademyandCategory: Tickets(or whatever you picked) so you can confirm where you are.If the dropdown is empty, you don't have Composer access to any app yet — see Block 5.
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Read the report tree, pick fields
The left pane — Select Fields — is your report tree. Your App Builder organized the fields into folders so they're easier to find:
Tickets,Assignee,Location,Dates, and so on. Expand any folder to see its fields. Click a field to add it to your report.Three small mechanics worth knowing immediately:
- Search. The search bar above the tree filters fields as you type — useful when the tree is deep.
- Add a field. Click the field. It appears in the Selected Data middle pane as a card, and the Preview on the right updates immediately to show live data.
- Same field, twice. You can add the same field more than once — useful later when one copy is a label and the other has a count formula on it (covered in Lesson 4). Just click the field a second time.
Keep clicking until the report has the columns you want, in roughly the right shape. Don't worry about polish yet — sort order, renames, and filtering all come in the next two lessons.
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Read the live preview, then View Full Document
The right pane — Preview — runs a live query against your data source and shows the top 50 rows. That's a safety cap: if the underlying table has 72,000 or 7,200,000 rows, you don't want every keystroke to pull all of them.
The preview is enough for a sanity check — are these the right columns? Is the data what you expected? If something looks wrong (wrong columns, suspicious values), it's usually faster to fix it now than after you've built ten more reports on the same shape.
To see the entire dataset, click View Full Document in the top-right toolbar. This runs the full query against your data source. Inside that view, you get a few interactive features:
- Sort. Click a column header to sort ascending. Click again for descending. Click a third time to clear the sort.
- Filter at runtime. Type in the filter row to narrow results. This is just-for-now filtering — it doesn't save with the report.
- Group by drag. Drag a column header up to the bar that reads "Drag a column and drop it here to group by that column", and rows collapse into groups.
When you're done exploring, click the View Full Document icon again to return to the builder. The preview-vs-full distinction matters later — for now, get used to using the preview to iterate and View Full Document to verify.
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Save the report
Right now your work isn't saved. Click off the page or refresh the browser and you'll lose it. Save by clicking the red Save button in the top-right.
The Create Report dialog opens with three things to fill in:
- Report Name. What appears in the library. Be specific —
Open tickets — last 3 monthsbeatsTickets. - Report Description. Required. Shows up next to the report in the library, so anyone browsing knows what it does without opening it. Two sentences is plenty.
- Report Location. Toggle between Team (shared) and Private (yours alone). Pick a folder in the tree below.
If you picked a Team folder, a Report Permissions section appears below — checkboxes for which groups can see this report. Advanced Options below that hides finer-grained settings you'll meet later. For now, the basics are all you need.
Click Save And Apply. The dialog closes, and the header at top now shows
Document Name: (your report name)— your confirmation that it's saved. - Report Name. What appears in the library. Be specific —
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Come back and edit
To re-open a saved report, click the Documents library icon in the left sidebar (the folder icon). Browse to your folder, find the report, click Edit. Composer reloads with everything exactly as you saved it.
From here, every change you make is unsaved until you save again. The Save button now offers two options — Overwrite the existing report, or Save As to create a copy under a new name. Overwrite locks in changes. Save As is what you use to spin a new report off an existing one as a template, a pattern you'll lean on heavily in Module 11 (Dashboards).
If you made changes you don't want, just refresh the browser — or re-edit from the library. The on-disk version reloads, your unsaved edits disappear.
You have a working connection. Below is what to tighten before real users see it. Skip if you're just testing.
Make it real
Habits that compound. Adopt these from your first report and you won't need to unlearn anything later.
Draft in Private, ship to Team
Every Composer user has a Private library — content there is only visible to you. Save there while a report is rough. When it works the way you want, save a copy into a Team folder where the audience can find it. This separates "I'm still figuring this out" from "this is ready for other people."
Some teams keep a permanent Work in Progress subfolder inside their Private library for the same reason — drafts have a home, finished reports aren't competing for shelf space with half-baked ones.
"Can I add a subfolder here?" is your read-permission test
Trying to save to a Team folder and not sure whether you have permission? Look at the folder in the Report Location tree during save. If you can see an option to add a subfolder inside it, you have save permission on that folder. If not, you don't — try a different folder or ask your admin.
Don't just click Save and see what happens — the resulting "Folder permission denied" error is unambiguous, but it wastes a step.
Name reports the way future-you will search
The report name is what shows up in the library, in scheduled-delivery emails, in dashboard widgets, in audit logs. A name like Report 3 is useless six months from now; Open tickets by customer — last 3 months reads as a sentence and tells you what's inside without opening it.
Description is where the longer story goes — what the report is for, who maintains it, what assumptions it makes. Treat the description as a note to whoever inherits the report.
Use Save As to spin off variations
Once a report works for one audience, a slight variation often works for another — same shape, different filter, different sort. Open the original, change what's different, click Save As, give it a new name. You now have two reports with one mental model behind them.
The same trick is the foundation of dashboard-building in Module 11 — one "base" report saved several times, each with a different angle, all pointing at the same underlying data.
Ask your admin for the folders you need
If the Team library doesn't have a folder that fits your work — or has only one read-only folder you can't save into — that's a setup question, not a Composer question. Admins create parent folders in Settings → Library, then grant save permission per group. The conversation is usually quick: tell them what audience the reports are for, and they'll add a folder with the right access.
If you're stuck
The classic first-day stumbles. None of them mean anything's broken — they're just things the video doesn't pause to name.
The "Select an App and Category" dropdown is empty
You don't have the Composer role on any app yet. Settings → Security → Apps shows what's assigned; if nothing's there, talk to your admin. Roles & permissions covers the role model — Composer is the role you need to build reports. If you're the admin assigning yourself, remember to Save & Apply and then refresh the page; the assignment doesn't reach the running session until you do.
I switched categories and lost my work
Switching categories with unsaved changes prompts you — save first or discard? If you clicked through too fast, you discarded. The fix is muscle memory: save first (red Save button, top-right), then switch. Once a report is saved, switching categories opens a fresh blank report rather than blowing yours away.
"Folder permission denied" when I try to save
You picked a folder you don't have save permission on. Three options: pick a different Team folder (try the "can I add a subfolder?" test from Block 4), save into your Private library and move the report later, or ask your admin to grant you permission on the folder you want.
The report tree shows folders but no fields
Folders are collapsed by default — click the chevron next to a folder name to expand it. If a folder is genuinely empty after expanding, that's an App Builder choice — the field structure is defined in Module 3's Report Tree lesson. Talk to whoever set up the app if you expected fields to be there.
View Full Document takes a long time
That's how much data your data source has. The top-50 preview is fast because it's capped; View Full Document is whatever your query actually costs. If it's painfully slow, the answer isn't to avoid running it — it's to add criteria (filters) so the query doesn't scan everything. The next lesson on criteria and prompts is where this gets handled.
My preview shows the right columns but no data
One of two things, usually. Either the underlying table is genuinely empty for the rows that would appear in the top 50 — confirm with View Full Document. Or you added a field whose join excludes everything (more likely once you're pulling fields from multiple folders that join to different tables). If View Full Document is also empty, check with whoever owns the data source. If View Full Document has data but the preview doesn't, the top-50 sample landed on rows where the joined field is null.
None of these match my situation
Email team@dashboardfox.com with what you were trying to do and what happened instead. Screenshot helps. Same business day reply.
