Generating Reports

Watson Explorer Engine provides a number of built-in system reports that enable you to track and retrieve information about various types of system events. Traditional, end-user Watson Explorer Engine deployments typically use the graphical report-building capabilities of the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool to define and generate reports that are specific to a given customer scenario. API-based applications and Watson Explorer Engine deployments often do not use these default reports, but instead create custom reports by using the Generating Custom System Reports function to retrieve XML containing all of the reporting information for a given time period, and then filtering and organizing it manually. API-based applications and deployments can also use the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool to create custom reports that can subsequently be generated and retrieved using other functions that are discussed in the remainder of this section.

Tip: All of the functions in this section that produce reports take a start date and end date for the range of report items to retrieve. These dates are expressed in standard date/time format (CCYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss[Z|(+|-)hh:mm). If you do not specify a time zone, the default time zone used is Coordinated Universal Time -4 hours, not the local system's time zone. If you are not retrieving all of the report items that you expect to see, you should explicitly specify your time zone (using the Z-N portion of the date specification, where N is your offset from coordinated universal time. You can also do this in a more general sense by passing System.DateTimeKind.Local as the timezone parameter to functions such as the C# DateTime function.