Time Series Data

Time Series Data is data of the same indicator for different time periods or dates. So for example you may have Population Estimates for 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. The indicator is called Population Estimates which has data for 5 dates. In your feature service you would have 5 corresponding fields containing the data values.

It is important to make the Report Builder understand which fields contain dates so that you can use Line charts and Time Series Tables effectively.

Whether or not Report Builder understands which fields of your feature service are separate indicators and where a number of fields form different dates for the same indicator depends on the naming of the fields. Report Builder will try to guess from your field name if it contains a date or not. For example, a field called ‘pop_2000’ would be recognised as an indicator called pop and a date of 2000. However depending on what your date is, this may not always work e.g. ‘pop_jan’, ‘pop_feb’, etc. would be understood by the Report Builder as separate indicators without dates.

To ensure that the Report Builder can pick up the time series data quickly and correctly from the field name used, you should make use of the pipe symbol (‘|’) to link the indicator name and the date in the field name. The format of the field name is:

<indicator name>|<date> (for example Population|2000 or Population|January.)

If you are using the data from the feature service, you will need to set up their Field Aliases within ArcGIS Online web map with this format as these are the names which will be visible in your report.

An example of correctly formatted data for multiple dates in ArcGIS Online is shown below.

ArcGIS Feature Layer with time series aliases

If you are using CSV files as your data source, you can pre-define time series by formatting the column headers using this format.

An example of correctly formatted CSV data for multiple dates is shown below:

CSV with Time Series

Report Builder will recognise the text before the pipe symbol ‘|’ as the indicator name and the text after the pipe symbol is treated as the time period label.