Specialized Administration > Analyzing System and Business Information > Reports and Queries > About Reports > Exporting and Importing Windchill Reports > Setup Required for Exporting and Importing Custom Report Files
  
Setup Required for Exporting and Importing Custom Report Files
Custom report files are any files (such as Info*Engine tasks, JSPs, RBINFO files, and so on) created or modified by the customer and used by a report. The Export Reports and Import Reports actions available from the Reports table will export and import only those custom files that reside in a specified location in your Windchill installation. This location is a directory, by default ext, relative to <Windchill>/codebase and <Windchill>/tasks, that is specified as the value for the Report Customization Directory preference. This preference is found under the Reports category in the Preference Management utility launched from the Site utilities page.
PTC-provided report artifacts and code are not exported.
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Customer-created Query Builder report templates that are exposed as reports in the Reports table and do not use any additional customer-created or customer-modified files are not considered custom, nor are the PTC-provided load files for reports and report templates, the Cognos report specification XML files, and Cognos report attributes properties files. As a result, these files are exported and imported by the Export Reports and Import Reports actions from the locations where they are stored by the Windchill system.
If you want to use custom files with your Windchill reports, follow the steps outlined in Best Practices for Customizing Files Supplied by PTC and Setting Up a Directory Structure for Managing Customized Files and Text Tailoring to create the requisite ext directory in the customization safe area, save your custom files there, and propagate them to the Windchill installation directory. If you choose to use a directory name other than ext, you must set the Report Customization Directory preference accordingly. Changing the preference value to match another PTC-provided directory name is not supported.
When using the Export Reports and Import Reports actions to export reports with custom files from one Windchill system and import them into another Windchill system, the value for the Report Customization Directory preference must be the same on both the source and target systems.
For information on updating existing custom reports to comply with this setup, see article CS123005 available from the eSupport portal at the following URL: https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/portal/