Reports#
A report is a saved document that brings together assets from any of your projects (geometries, surface meshes, volume meshes and cases) and presents them side by side: summary tables of their key inputs and results, synchronized 3D visualizations, and 2D charts of forces, moments or other result variables. A report stays editable after it is created, and it can be exported to PDF at any time.
When to use a report#
Reports are the tool for work that spans several assets or that needs to outlive a browser session:
Comparing design variants or sweep points. Every quantity in a report is compared against a chosen reference case: summary tables show deltas against it and charts can plot differences to it directly.
Comparing meshes and geometries, not only cases. A report can hold the geometry, the surface mesh and the volume mesh of a study next to its cases, each with its own summary and visualization.
Keeping a record. The report configuration (which assets, which sections, which settings and camera positions) is saved with the report, so the same view of the study can be reopened later or applied to a new set of assets.
Handing results to someone without Flow360 access. The PDF export is a static snapshot: it remains readable after the underlying assets change or are deleted.
For a quick, throw-away look at two or more cases, the interactive Case comparison view is lighter: it is not saved and is limited to cases.
How a report is organized#
A report is a grid of sections. Summary sections exist for each asset type present in the report; any number of visualization and 2D chart sections can be added on top. Sections can be renamed, reordered and resized, and each one has its own selection of the report’s assets, so one chart can focus on a subset of the cases while another shows them all.
Summary tables list the inputs and headline results of each asset. For cases this includes the flow conditions, the turbulence and transition models, the step counts and the force coefficients, with an optional set of automotive metrics. The surfaces over which forces are integrated can be restricted to selected faces or body groups.
Visualization sections render several assets of one type with a shared camera and shared visualization settings, so that the same region and the same field are compared. Individual views can be unlinked when a different camera or field is wanted for one asset. Scenes and viewpoints saved in the workbench can be reused.
2D chart sections plot result variables against a sweep parameter (for example the angle of attack), against the solver history, or against a spatial coordinate for sectional data, with the geometry outline available as a chart background. Chart data can be downloaded as CSV.
The controls of each section, their options and limits are documented in the WebUI guide: Reports.
Reports from Python#
Reports are built and viewed in the WebUI, and the same reports can be driven from Python with the
flexcompute-flow-report companion package, installed separately from flow360. It creates a report
from a set of assets and section definitions, loads a report saved in the browser, updates its content or
metadata, and applies an existing report to a new set of assets, which is the scripted counterpart of
Apply to new. A report created this way opens in the WebUI like any other. Exporting to PDF and
deleting a report remain WebUI operations. The package interface is described in
Python API: Reports.