Reporting in Drupal Commerce 2.x is Going to be Great!

The good news is that Commerce 2.x has the potential to handle a ton of different reports and display the data any way you want. The dashboard is complete, and the framework is impressive. The catch is that many of the reports don’t technically exist yet, so you need to do a little configuring to make sure you’re looking at the data that’s most important to you.

What kind of reports are we talking about?

If you need reports for checkout, cart, or analytics, you can have them all in the Commerce reporting suite, even if they are vastly different types of reports. For instance, you could have a whole suite of point-of-sale reports (in Commerce 1, they were their own set of reports; in Commerce 2, they build on Commerce reporting). So you can have separate reports for people who manage different metrics, but you can make them all using the same framework.

How does this work in terms of configuration?

You can build some of these reports through views. We also use a Twig templating system now, which is not quite as easy to use but is more robust for building more complex reports. Twig templating allows you to do the complete templating and theming. Say you’re building a Drupal site: you might configure stuff in the back end or develop your own theme (or some combination of the two). Reports work the same way.

That means we have more flexibility than in Commerce 1, which mostly handled reports through views. Using views can work, but you can run into performance and flexibility issues with complex data (like if you have two million orders on which you’re trying to run reports).

What can we expect from the production release of Commerce 2.x?

It’s important to note that production and reporting don’t actually have the same release schedule because Commerce reporting is an add-on module. So when Commerce 2.0 will track all the data upon its release, there will be some reporting you can do, but the suite of reports that come with the production release will be a little thin initially.

The bottom line: reports are a lot more flexible than they used to be.

To learn more, check out our High Five episode Drupal Commerce 2.x.: Reporting and Analytics.

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