Reports can be set up to be generated automatically on a time schedule, and delivered to yourself and other users via email. Your administrator will have enabled the scheduling of reports for the entire system, and assuming you have been given permission, you will be able to schedule your own reports to be received by yourself and other users of the system.
Column reports, Summary reports, Matrix reports and Charts may be scheduled and delivered via email. Note that other report types may not be scheduled - typically because they require interactivity with the user. Also note that fields with drilldown capability, such as the Attahments, Document Fields and Image fields are removed from the output of a scheduled report.
Before you schedule a report, you must first save it. After saving, you may edit the report and you will see a button in the menubar with the label Schedule Report. When you click this button, you will see a screen similar to:
Setting the schedule for a report
Note that if you use the Save As option on a report, any schedule that was set up on the report is not copied to the new report. It is unlikely that the user would want to send the same report output on two identical schedules.
The functions of the entries on this screen are as follows:
| Entry | Purpose |
| Schedule Enabled | You may enable and disable the schedule for a report. If you disable the schedule, ExtraView suspends the sending of future reports on this schedule, but the schedule details are maintained. |
| Frequency | You may select one of Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly on a day, Monthly on a date. |
| Start no sooner than | The selections here will change according to your choice of frequency. Note that the report may not be sent precisely on the time you select. If many users have scheduled reports at the same moment, then ExtraView queues these and sends them out one after the other. This avoids swamping the server and degrading the performance to all users while the reports are being prepared and sent. |
Note that the time selected is the time in the schedule owner's own time zone.
Next, you will select the recipients to receive the scheduled report. Click on the Recipients tab and you will see:
Selecting recipients for a report
Use the Click to select user(s) button to add users to the schedule, or use the Del button to remove the user from the schedule. You may only schedule reports to be delivered to other licensed ExtraView users, not to any person through an email address. However, it is permissible to schedule a report for delivery to an ExtraView guest user so if you need to deliver a scheduled report to a person who is not an ExtraView user, ask you administrator to create a guest account with appropriate permissions.
You will most probably want to create an accompanying email with the scheduled report. The Email Layout button allows you to create the subject line and body for the email. The default subject line for the email delivery is the title to the report, but you can change this. Use the Email Body editor to compose the email that you want to send. Note that if you want to embed an image or logo within the body of the email, that the image must exist on a server that both you and the recipients of the report can access. If any of the recipients are going to be outside the firewall of your company's network, then you should use an absolute path to the image. For example, if you plan to add a company logo as part of your signature to the body of the email, you might include this image with a URL such as http://www.mywebsite.com/images/company_logo.png. The email layout screen looks like this:
Creating the subject line and body to accompany the report
Lastly, there are some options that can be set for the schedule. These are accessed via the Options tab.
Options for the scheduled report
| Entry | Purpose |
| Run scheduled report as this role | By default the current role of the user creating the report is selected. However, there may be reasons to run the report as a different role. For example an Administrator may want to set up a schedule, but send out the report using the permissions of the Quality Assurance role. |
| Output format | Scheduled reports are sent as attachments to the email that the recipient receives. You can choose to send the attachment as either a text file, a Microsoft Word file, a Microsoft Excel file, an HTML file or an Adobe PDF file. Note that the links to many functions that appear within the same report created within a browser are removed, as are images. This is because these links and images rely on the user being signed on to ExtraView when they are utilized.
Note that the output format you select for a scheduled report overrides the saved output format for any report. This allows you to choose a different format for the scheduled output, as opposed to running the report within your own browser. |
| Suppress recipient list | This allows the report scheduler to suppress the names of all the recipients who receive the report. |
| Suppress empty reports | By default, ExtraView will always generate and send a scheduled report to all the recipients. If this option is selected, then the entire email is suppressed if there are no results on the report. It is worth noting that if the scheduled report is being prepared for each recipient, as opposed to being prepared once and sent to all recipients, then the report may or may not be generated for each individual user, according to the filters used on the report, such as privacy group. The administrator will have set up the options that enable or disable this functionality. |
Once you have filled in the information, you click on the Schedule Report button in the menubar of the window to save your scheduled report.
Note the button named Run Now in the menubar of the popup. When you click this button, the report is immediately sent to the scheduler task and executed. All recipients should receive their copy of the report with this action.
On the Query screen, click the button with the title Manage Scheduled Reports. This will display a list of all scheduled reports for which you are the owner. From this screen you can edit the schedule for any report that has an existing schedule.
Managing your scheduled reports
Note that in order to be able to alter the schedule, you must be the person who created the schedule. The exception to this is that the administrator may also modify the schedule for all scheduled reports.
