As much as I have used your writings in my research and projects I am happy to reply to your questions about Dyer's work. You are referring to what used to be volume 2 of Frederick H. Dyer's three-volume work. Right off the bat, I am not sure if any part of Dyer's "A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion" is available online. If it is, somebody please tell us. If not, you will probably have to use the library's set--and nearly all libraries of any size have a set of Dyer in the reference section.
Dyer's original second volume is indeed a state-by-state chronological record of battles, skirmishes, and etc. Under the state heading, Dyer lists each known skirmish, incident, affair, battle, and whatever in date order with a location and the Union troops engaged and a number of their casualties from the action. You can tell from the title that Dyer writes from the Union perspective, but his work is a landmark even then. Sadly, his bias means Confederate troops and their casualty figures are omitted.
Remember to use the locations given with a grain of salt. Often in Missouri actions I have discovered the location identified is where some Yankee patrol was garrisoned and the actual location of some skirmish may be miles away from the place named. I think this weakness originated from Dyer using Union Army records where some clerk back at headquarters failed to hear exactly where some fight took place and simply wrote the location of the appropriate Yankee's troop's official station. Supposedly, that at least placed the action in the ballpark. In rare cases, the date may be off, too, for similar reasons.
Although Frederick Dyer was meticulous to record everything he could, his record--at least for Missouri actions--is not a complete list of all such actions. There was just too much going on in Missouri anyway, and lots of stuff never got a mention in the official records.
Recent editions of Dyer are published condensed into two volumes instead of the original three, but nothing was omitted in these newer sets.
When I was a kid I seem to remember reading that Frederick Dyer had a photographic memory and composed the thumbnail histories of the Yankee regiments in the original first volume mostly from memory.
Be that as it may, don't look for histories of the Confederate units in Dyer, as he only writes about the Yanks. For this, use Broadfoot Publishing Company's ten-to-fifteen-year-old set called "Supplement to the 'O.R.'" This set of over 100 volumes is usually found in the larger libraries and in college libraries, and most of the set are the itineraries of Union and Confederate units month by month throughout the war.
Bruce Nichols