A System Report that you schedule will run in the background at a certain time, or at certain periodic intervals, and, when complete, will package the results into a displayable file. This is then automatically e-mailed to one or more recipients, or placed into a specific location on your local network or a remote network. When the report is viewed, the formatting of the results should match the expectations of the recipients in terms of their locale.
Thus, when you schedule a report, you have to provide the following information:
• The file format into which the results are to be packaged • The means of delivery of the results, and their destination • When to run the report
• A specific data dictionary and set of regional settings To schedule a report, use the following procedure:
1. Display the Management Information and Reporting view by clicking the relevant icon in the shortcut bar.
2. In the tree-browser pane, choose the appropriate information or reporting category and expand that folder. Keep expanding the sub-folders until you can see the report you wish to schedule.
3. Right-click the report and select Schedule Report from the menu that pops up.
4. In the Report Format tab of the New Scheduled Job dialogue box, select the preferred file format into which the report output should be packaged. The first option will create a single MHT file that can be viewed in a Web browser. The second will create a ZIP archive containing an HTML file and its related files, which, once extracted, can also be viewed in a Web browser. 5. Click the Report Delivery Options tab.
7. If you opt for the e-mail delivery mode (which is the default), you should complete the mailing details. Use the Send To button to display the Address Book dialogue box, which allows you to specify the intended recipient(s). 8. If, when displaying the Report Delivery Options tab, you choose the option
to place the results into a file on the network, the tab immediately changes to show the following:
In the UNC field, specify a suitable folder in the relevant computer on the network, either via the browse button or by typing its UNC path. In the File Name field, type an appropriate name (without any extension) for the report file to be created. Note that the file format you have already chosen will determine the file’s extension.
9. If, when displaying the Report Delivery Options tab, you choose the option to place the results into a file on an FTP server, the tab immediately changes to show the following:
Enter the name of the FTP server, the login details for that server, the path to the folder in which to place the report file to be created, and an appropriate name (without any extension) for the report file. Note that the file format you have already chosen will determine the file’s extension.
10. Click the Schedule tab.
11. In this tab, specify how often the report is to run by selecting the relevant item from the Run field’s drop-down list. If you select “Once a day”, the
In this case, select the day(s) of the week on which the report should run, and choose whether this should keep occurring indefinitely, or a specified number of times.
If you select any frequency other than “Once a day”, the options that are displayed in the Schedule tab will include one that allows you to choose the first day of the relevant period on which the report should run.
12. In the Starting field, specify the date and time at which the report is to run for the first time (or only time, if appropriate).
14. In this tab, check whether the settings displayed by default are appropriate to the intended readers of the report and, if not, adjust them suitably. The data dictionary specified should give the report a presentational context that corresponds to the readers’ requirements or expectations (such as the results being labelled in their own terminology or language). The time zone selected should, of course, be the readers’ time zone. The predefined format setting relates to the localised date and/or time, and should be either the readers’ language/region or [Custom Settings]. A language/region selection would give the format normally associated with that part of the world. The [Custom Settings] selection would activate the field below, allowing you to explicitly specify a non-standard date/time format. When you specify such a custom format, there are a number of coded elements you can use, and they are the same as those that apply to a similar field in the Regional Settings tab of the analyst-properties dialogue box, as described in Adding a New Support
Analyst on page 99.
15. Click Apply to save your changes, and OK to close the dialogue box. A Scheduled Job entity now appears in the tree browser as a “child” of the report, confirming that a schedule has been set up. You can examine and make changes to the schedule at any time by double-clicking the Scheduled Job entity, which opens the Scheduled Job Properties dialogue box. This is identical to the New Scheduled Job dialogue box and allows you to modify any of the existing
When the starting time set in the schedule is reached, the report runs and an appropriate file containing the results is created. The file is then immediately forwarded to its intended destination via the relevant delivery mechanism. In the case of e-mail, there will be a delay determined by the current setting of the Mail Scheduler poll interval in the server configuration.