What the Custom Reports Admin page does in VICIdial

Every VICIdial installation ships with a set of standard built-in reports, but call centers usually need more: a Real-time report built for their own KPIs, a Whiteboard report filtered to a specific team, or a third-party analytics page that pulls data from the dialer. The Custom Reports Admin page is where you register those additional reports so that they show up as named links on the main Reports page, right alongside the standard ones. Anyone who lands on the Reports page sees only the links their user group is permitted to access, and your bespoke report fits naturally into that permission model.

What it does

The page has three core operations: add a new custom report entry, modify an existing one, and delete one you no longer need. Each entry stores a report name, a domain (optional — leave it blank when the report lives on the same server as the web admin), a path name that points to the report script or URL, and a list of user groups that are allowed to see the link. The system combines the domain and path into a complete URL and surfaces it as a clickable link on the Reports page. Agents and supervisors who belong to an authorized user group see the link; everyone else does not. The page also supports Preset Constants, which let you pre-fill report parameters — that feature is covered in depth in a separate post.

flowchart TD
  A[Custom Reports Admin] --> B[Add / Modify / Delete entry]
  B --> C[Report Name]
  B --> D[Domain + Path Name]
  B --> E[User Group access]
  C --> F{Name unique?}
  F -->|No - duplicate| G[System rejects it]
  F -->|Yes| H[Entry saved]
  D --> H
  E --> H
  H --> I[Link appears on Reports page]
  I --> J{User in allowed group?}
  J -->|Yes| K[User sees the link]
  J -->|No| L[Link hidden from user]

The name uniqueness rule

VICIdial enforces one strict constraint on the Report Name field: it must not duplicate any other custom report name, and it must not duplicate the name of any standard system report. This matters because the report name is used for two purposes beyond display — it controls user group access settings and it is referenced in secondary server configurations. If you reuse a name that already exists, the system rejects the entry. The practical rule is to give each custom report a name that is obviously specific: include the team name, the date range it targets, or the campaign it covers. That naming habit also makes the Reports page easier to scan for your users.

Who uses this and why

System administrators are the primary audience for this page. A typical use case: your Campaign managers have asked for a daily summary report that shows Disposition totals for the previous day, and that report lives on a separate analytics server. Without the Custom Reports Admin page, each manager would need to remember a long URL and bookmark it manually. With it, you register the URL once, assign access to the correct user group, and every authorized manager sees a clean link on their Reports page. When the report URL changes, you update it in one place.

The delete operation is equally useful during cleanup. When a report is decommissioned or replaced, removing its entry from Custom Reports Admin immediately hides the link from the Reports page for all users — no need to chase down individual bookmarks or user settings.

For the broader picture of admin tools in this part of VICIdial, read the VICIdial admin bulk tools guide. For the step-by-step process of actually adding a custom report link, see how to add a custom report link to the Reports page.

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