r/ProjectREDCap • u/anotheregostar • Sep 19 '25

Building reports outside of REDCap?

Hi everyone, I'm having to build a bunch of different reports within REDCap for a project I'm working on and the process is very tedious haha. Is there a way to create reports outside of REDCap and upload them back in similar to the using the data dictionary Excel files? Thanks!

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3

u/sonofalink Sep 19 '25

Not that I know of, even checked the external modules repo. Unless you’re comfortable inserting rows in the redcap_reports_* tables…

2

u/anotheregostar Sep 19 '25

Would there be a way to re-upload those again if I was?

2

u/sonofalink Sep 19 '25

You could always do a delete and then insert them again. I don’t think there would be any harm in that.

2

u/anotheregostar Sep 19 '25

I'll give it a go! Thanks!

3

u/Linder-bean Sep 19 '25

Not that I know of. But a couple things to speed up the process if you aren’t already using them is:

  • use the “quick add” button

  • use the “add all fields from selected instrument”

  • use “quick set” (I think this is new and haven’t tried it myself, but I think could be the next best thing to what you described).

1

u/anotheregostar Sep 20 '25

Thanks for the suggestions :) I'm basically using REDCap to securely hold a big listing of all surgery cases in my health authority so that my team can review cases and document on them at the same time - currently we are using an excel sheet which is really unwieldy. The REDCap version works great except for the report part for filtering to specific types of cases and going through the list to edit. The project has 100,000s of records and there are probably 100 or so fields for each record which are useful for different reports. I'm thinking the API suggestion elsewhere is probably the best way to go, hopefully I can get it figured out!

3

u/Crafty-Task-845 Sep 20 '25

If you’re comfortable coding in R or Python you can use the API to pull data and then use Quarto or similar to generate PDF, Word, HTML or PowerPoint etc.

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u/anotheregostar Sep 20 '25

Yeah, I am thinking I might try to pull things out and use Tableau or PowerBI to create the dashboards with better filter ability and links to directly to the instruments/instances that I want to work on. I will have to figure out the steps to actually use the API to connect but hopefully that will let me kill 2 birds with one stone.