I have a report that writes to a hold file with the format of FOCUS (ON TABLE HOLD AS 'filename' FORMAT FOCUS). this creates a .mas and a .acx file. My intentions are to create a data set to be used by a report that is launched from a website, and I want the report to run quickly. So I created this report that I can schedule in report caster, and then I wrote a report that uses this hold file as the source. The issue is that when I schedule the report with the TABLE HOLD FORMAT FOCUS, it doesn't return a report, and therefore the reportcaster job log returns an error. However, the job worked! The job ran the report, created the hold file, and populated the hold file. But because there was no report to distribute, I got an error message (a false negative, essentially). Is there something that can be done about this? I'd prefer to only get an error message if the job actually failed. If there is a better way to go about this altogether, I'd be willing to hear that as well.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Scott Matson,

Of course, as soon as I seek help I figure out a solution. For those wondering here's what I did.

My RC Job has the distribution method of Email, which allows me to schedule multiple tasks for the same RC Job. So far, 2 of my tasks are the hold files that were returning the false negative because they didn't actually return a report. So my solution was to include one of the front end reports that uses these hold files as my final task. Now when the job runs, it actuallys gets to send out a report and it returns a success.

Scott:

If you lick the notification tab in the ReportCaster job dialogue, you can change "Notification will be sent out" to "Never" which will suppress the error messages when there is no report involved.

However, what I do with a couple of datamarts that I rebuild each night is run a report that tells me how many records have been processed - in my case the number of sales orders and associated products. Just so I know things are working well, I have a second FOCUS database where I store this information.

Because orders are being constantly added to the main databases and therefore the datamart I can quickly look and see if the number of orders and products processed is increasing on a daily basis - as they should.

** You could lick the notification tab, I guess, but CLICKing it might get a better response - sorry for the typo!