I cannot find any documentation on this, either here or in the PDF files I have on RC... so this might not be possible.

I have a process that runs each morning, refreshing a series of hold files so that we have current data that's quickly accessible (The SPROCs that generate the data take too long to run in a realtime dashboard).

I'm hoping to grab the completion message that we have generate every morning, and stuff the timestamp (in readible format), completion message, and any other relevant metadata into a SQL table, so that I can pull it out and display a note to the customers reflecting when the data was last refreshed.

Is there any way to do this? I was looking at the raw RC SQL, and I see that the datetime stamp is obfuscated, so I can't readily display it...unless there's something I don't know about that too.

Hopefully this isn't too big a deal to do. Would appreciate hearing any suggestion about this

Thanks so much!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Peter,

There are a couple of articles in the tips and techniques section within the Developer Centre that might help you understand date time "holders" in Report Caster. One is "What is Zulu Time" by Susannah Jones and another is "How to Automatically Delay RC Jobs" by Jodye Yates.

Both use principles of converting the dates to or from a count of milliseconds since the FOCUS base date (which is 31/12/1900). They also have some explanation on how they achieve this - and it is this explanation that I think may help you.

One question though - what are you using for your RC repository?

OK I lied, one more question - why copy them when they are completely accessible from within WF anyway?

T

Peter,

In my shop we do a lot of the same, updating XFOCUS data marts for the front end reporting instead of directly against Oracle. We have a data load/ stats db(focus) that we populate as part of the data mart updates (in your case it could be part of the hold file(s) process). We use some DM to establish the process start/end date and time , number of records (new, updates, etc) plus the related process content (i.e. new customers, sales, revenue). That data is then used and embededd within our report headings to say when the data was last updated. We have found this custom process easier and more relevant than trying to use the RC logs that will simply illustrate a sucessful or unsucessful job.

Jimbo, our process is very similar to yours, yes. The only main caveat (typical of where I work ) is that we have 30 different "data stewards", clinical report writers who are charged with the maintenance and accuracy of the data that my team then displays on our dashboards...

They validate their own measures whenever the data is refreshed (even though we refresh the hold files every morning) in SQL... and some overly ambitious ones have validated data too early on a given day, did not see updated results, and complained of errors.

Instead of just landing on a 'safe' time for analysts to validate measures (the easy solution), I was tasked with writing the hold-file refresh date/timestamp in a global on the dashboard, to refresh daily. heh

Oh, and hi again Tony!

quote:

One question though - what are you using for your RC repository?

SQL Server 2005

quote:

OK I lied, one more question - why copy them when they are completely accessible from within WF anyway?

Really, just one main reason. Besides what I wrote above, about needing to display the most-current load stamp on the global header of the dashboard, we also have a public webpage for our EDW, OLAP, BI and Analytics teams showing all of the loads from all of the warehouses, datamarts, and/or other data repositories, and I'll need to bring this data into that flow now too.


Thanks again so much for your help, btw. I've had a great response here from y'all, and it's been hugely beneficial. I'm mostly self-taught with FOCUS, so the forums and the documentation libraries are my only context to things. It's so great to get help from the community when I'm stumped