We currently have 4 scheduled WebFOCUS report procedures that "burst" and email report output as HTML document attachments to customers.

Customers have asked for all 4 reports to be included in one email.

I checked the WebFocus 5.2 Best Practices doc and found this is not supported (we have ver 4.3.5 right now).

Anyone have any ideas on how you could accomplish this another way?

Also, does anyone know how to get ReportCaster to use another filename for the attachments it creates?

Everything you are looking for (multiple reports, named attachments, etc) is in 5.2. That's the easiest answer.

As for using 4.3.x, I believe in 436 (not sure about 435) you could create a compound PDF document and email it through ReportCaster. The PDF document could have multiple reports (including graphs) concatenated together in a single document. The named attachments option would require 5.2.

Hope this helps.

quote:

Originally posted by Kyle:
[qb] Everything you are looking for (multiple reports, named attachments, etc) is in 5.2. That's the easiest answer.

As for using 4.3.x, I believe in 436 (not sure about 435) you could create a compound PDF document and email it through ReportCaster. The PDF document could have multiple reports (including graphs) concatenated together in a single document. The named attachments option would require 5.2.

Hope this helps. [/qb]

Kyle,

Yes that does help.

I'll consult documentation on multi-PDF.

Customers may be OK with that format.

Wasn't sure how ReportCaster figured out which report's sort field to use for distribution.

Dennis

This is just a random thought. I haven't tested it or anything, so don't hold me to it. 8^)

If you want to keep the 4 FEXs separate, but run them together, you might be able to do something like:
-INCLUDE MYFEX1
-INCLUDE MYFEX2
-INCLUDE MYFEX3
-INCLUDE MYFEX4
...and burst this new FEX.
This would work for HTML reports, but not PDF. In that case, you'll need to do something like:
SET COMPOUND='OPEN BREAK'
-INCLUDE MYFEX1
SET COMPOUND='BREAK'
-INCLUDE MYFEX2
SET COMPOUND='BREAK'
-INCLUDE MYFEX3
SET COMPOUND='CLOSE'
-INCLUDE MYFEX4
If you have a combination of HTML & PDF, then good luck! 8^)

I hope this helps.
-Michael

Dennis,
The PDF Compound Report option does not support bursting with ReportCaster so I don't think that is going to satisfy your needs. The reason that ReportCaster cannot support bursting of PDF Compound Reports in 52x is because there are multiple table requests involved and each of these have a different internal matrix on the WF Server Table Service side.
In 52x there is an enhancement for Scheduling when using the Administrator and Developer Scheduling Interface that you can schedule more than one FEX. This new feature supports the email and printer distribution methods and also supports bursting. There is also a new ZIP option for email. The user getting the email will receive one email with multiple attachments or a ZIP file containing the multiple reports.
So you would need to have each report request in a separate FEX and create a single schedule which would have multiple tasks (FEXs) that share a common distribution method (email in your case) and list/file (source of burst and email info to send).
Hope this helps,

you might want a simpler option. in 52x, in report caster, you can send a single email, as inline text, that is, itself, a combination of several output tables.
What you do is use that feature that saves each paragraph in your fex as a table name. Like this:

...focus code
ON TABLE SAVE AS MYREPORT1 FORMAT HTMTABLE
...more focus code
ON TABLE SAVE AS MYREPORT2 FORMAT HTMTABLE

then at the end of your fex you call an htmlform
-HTMLFORM BEGIN
HTML (enclose in carets)
HEAD(enclose in carets)

...put some cool stuff in here if you want
/HEAD (enclose in carets)
BODY (enclose in carets)

<!-- WEBFOCUS TABLE MYREPORT1 -->
<!-- WEBFOCUS TABLE MYREPORT2 -->
/BODY (enclose in carets)
/HEAD (enclose in carets)
/HTML (enclose in carets)

this will put both reports in one email, and you can select INLINE rather than as Attachment.
It works like a charm and is really cool.
You can go nuts and put bookmarks and hrefs to them in the top of your html code.
let me know if you try this and like it.
(you know why i had to say "enclose in carets"...because this message board doesn't read real html code strings. )