Report Scheduler

[Martyn Houghton]

Is there an timescale for the inclusion of report scheduling facility into the platform reporting capabilities?

Cheers

Martyn

[TrevorKillick]

Hi Martyn

I has asked development for an indication on the plans for Scheduling Reports, apologies for the late reply.

Kind Regards

Trevor Killick

[Gerry]

Martyn,

This requirement is behind another more fundamental requirement of getting report output into a format that can be stored. The problem with scheduling is you have to do something with the output, either save it or e-mail it or something like that. To do that we need to come up with a decent way of making the report output appropriate. HTML is not good enough, MHT format was the source of many complaints in the world of Supportworks so we don't want to go down that route. That really only leaves us with PDF format. This is a complex technical challenge because HTML does not render particularly well for print. We have some things in development around PDF generation which we have been working on this year. That however, has only shown us just how complicated it is to do well... The best I can offer you is its work in progress but we will not even consider scheduling until we have a way of getting our report output in to PDF, which is by far the biggest hurdle to overcome.

Gerry

[Martyn Houghton]

Gerry

Thanks for the update and hopefully you find a path through the PDF generation complications.

Cheers

Martyn

[Martyn Houghton]

Gerry

When you do come to the point where you are building the user story/requirements for the Report Scheduling, can the option be added to allow for the report to be run once a month but on the first actual day of the month rather than at the moment in Support Works you can schedule once a month but you have to choose a day of the week to run it on.

Cheers

Martyn

[Gerry]

Martyn,

Sure, we will bear it in mind.

Gerry

[Guest Adrian Hodgson]

Hi

This is Adrian from ORC. I would just like to say that I am very interested in having both sets of functionality as discussed here.  Being able to save report content to a file, and being able to schedule the delivery of reports.

Is one possibility to use the approach adopted in Support Works to start with to get something up and running sooner, whilst in the longer term you consider a more elegant solution.  

Adrian