View Mode
View Mode lets a user whose store has other stores reporting to it look at any of those stores — their stock, orders, issuing, returns, and reports — without signing in as someone else. Everything in View Mode is read-only: you are looking, not acting.
It is reached from View-mode in the sidebar, and is available to users with Manage Orders, Manage Issuing, or Manage Inventory permission. A store with nothing beneath it will find the store selector empty.
Choosing a store
The top of every View Mode screen has a Viewing as selector. It lists the stores that report to yours (directly or further down the chain) — never your own store. Pick one, and every screen below updates to that store. Switching stores re-loads the data automatically; there is no "apply" button.
The screens
A sub-navigation runs across the top:
| Screen | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | The selected store's current stock, and stock for a single product |
| Requisition | That store's requisition orders and their line items |
| Distribution | Distributions from that store |
| Issuing | That store's issuing and dispensing records; completed dispensing notes can be printed |
| Inventory | The selected store's current on-hand stock and its inventory (count) history |
| Returns | Returns to and from that store |
| Reports | The standard reports — and Custom Reports — scoped to the selected store (see below) |
Each list has a date-range picker and expands to show the detail of a row (an order's products, an issue's batches) the same way the store's own screens do — but with no edit, approve, submit, or acknowledge actions.
Reports in View Mode
The Reports screen here runs the same ten standard reports as Reports, plus the Custom Reports runner, all scoped to the store you have selected. Some reports also aggregate across the stores beneath the one you picked — so a regional manager can pull an Arrival or Wastage report for a district without that district having to send it.
Report PDFs and CSVs generated from View Mode carry the selected store's name, not yours.
The Custom Reports tab is hidden in DHIS2 mode, the same as on the main Reports screen.
Why the write actions are gone
Earlier versions of View Mode showed the same buttons as a store's own order and issuing screens — submit, approve, acknowledge, add product. Those never worked from View Mode: the server only ever lets a store act on its own records, so the buttons returned an error. They have been removed — View Mode is now strictly a window onto another store's data. To act on a store's behalf you still need an account at that store.