All,

I have a problem that I do not know how to resolve. I have a scheduled report in report caster that has 3 fex's - first one creates a report as an attachment, the second one is used as the inline HTML text that comes out in each email and the third one (from the distribution tab) creates the email address that the report is sent to. With this procedure, the majority of the email addresses have a report, but SOME do not.

I am trying to figure out a way for the folks email addresses that do no have an attachment coming not to receive the inline HTML message either, that is, no email to them at all.

So the question again is, if I have a report that has inline HTML in the email and there is no attachment (the report is blank or there is no report) is there a way to keep the person with that email address from getting the email?

Thanks for any help you are able to give.

Paul Mueller
St. Louis University
muellerp@sl.edu

Unless there are changes in ReportCaster in the lastest release...I don't think you have that option. What you might want to do, if it's the case there are 0 records in the report when they are not to receive them...is have a dummy report at the end of your report...that prints when there are no records...saying There was no Data today...or whatever....that would be the attachment for that day.

Prairie - that's what we would do with conventional coding for our dashboard. We have several different messages that appear with Dialog Manager, e.g.

-IF &RECORDS EQ 0 GOTO FINALE;
-FINALE
-INCLUDE SORRY
END

However, does Report Caster have a problem where you indicate that the output is Excel but an HTML "Sorry Charlie" message appears instead?

Thanks for the replies so far I appreciate your looking at my issue.

The problem that I have is that lets say there are 20 reports that I am bursting out but there are 22 email addresses because the other 2 do not have any info. Each email address (22) are going to get the inline html (whatever that is) then each person is going to get an attachment (except the 2) - so the 2 will get only the html inline text.

At this time we are going to add some additional text to the current message saying they won't get anything.

That seems to be the only option at this time.

I don't think the option of putting a dummy message in for ONLY the 2 folks with no attachment would work in this case.

Basically everyone would get the same message and those without attachments would just delete their message whereas the ones with attachments can then look at their output.

Thanks for the help.

I will check back later to see if there is anything else...

Paul Mueller
St. Louis University
muellerp@slu.edu

Paul,

In the fex that creates the distribution list, add a section that extracts all the burst values that will occur in your main report. Then use this list to limit the burst values produced in your distribution fex.

T

Paul

Not sure what version of WF /RC you are using but I believe that starting in WebFOCUS 7 Report Caster, you can use a focexec to create the distribution list this way you could see that only 20 out of the 22 should get emails and then create the distribution list for only those 20 this way the other 2 will or get the email.

Way Cool

Hope this helps

TS,

Exactly ................

T

you can create your own Distribution File, different from Distrib List (pre-existing) even in wf5. works great for us that way.

All,

Thanks for all the replies:

Texas Stingray, the list I make is dynamic so it is created on the fly when the request is run so there would be no static distribution list (if I understand you correctly, it sounds like you are speaking of a static dist list).

Tony, The problem with your solution is that the main report request is for people who are going to get a biweekly paycheck and the distribution email goes to those folks managers so there isn't a match at all - there is actually no match from main report to email output - does that make sense?

Paul, I am talking about a dynamic list. If you can create a WebFOCUS procedure that can determine which users should get an email then you should beable to use that and create a dynamic list.

Paul,

So you have two distinct caster jobs that have no commonality?

How then, can you reference the Employee to their Manager?

Take the CAR file (for instance). Treat the CAR as the Employee and the COUNTRY as the Manager.

The first caster job bursts on the VALUE of CAR because the report has BY CAR as the first sorting piece of code.

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM RCOST
BY CAR
WHERE CAR NE 'PEUGEOT'
-* Basically exclude FRANCE
END

The second caster job then has a busrt control of BY COUNTRY, but because the first caster job has no report to burst for FRANCE we need to surpress the second mail going to FRANCE.
So the dynamic distribution list fex should be something like (I can't recall the AS values for the dist fex) -

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM COUNTRY AS DISPLAY
BY EMAIL_ADDRESS
WHERE CAR NE 'PEUGEOT'
ON TABLE PCHOLD
END

Now, OK, this is a rather simplistic example but it should give you the idea. The CAR (Employee) field is not used in the distribution list with the exception of being a predicate, so FRANCE is effectively removed from the distribution.

So now you're going to tell me that you have no method of associating an Employee to their Manager?

T

Texas,

Yes I do create a dynamic list and it is emailed out to the folks - I think I need to stop for the day - I am not making sense to others - sorry.

Paul

All,

This issue has been resolved. I talked with a friend of mine in the IT department (a former IBI employee) and she found a solution.

I dare say I am a bit embarrased because once I saw what she did I realized it was something I should have thought of.

In any case, the department number from the first request was held in a file and used by the second request that basically said where the department I am looking for is in the file that was created. Easier than I thought it would be. Sometimes I thnk things are going to be much harder.

Thanks to all those who posted about this issue.

Sorry it took so long to get back to this.

Paul Mueller