Automate the chore of Scheduling??????

[fbermudez]

Hi,

By default most (if not all reports) created require multiple parameters to be entered in order to run the report.
For example: to run sales, the report prompts the user to enter a period (@pe) '0104' and the department (@dept) 'San Francisco'.
If I schedule the report, I need to not only change the period every month but also the office. This becomes very tedious when you have to schedule 100 offices.
Is there a way to schedule the report once and only go back to edit only the parameters that need to be changed.
Is there a third party application perhaps? A way to hack the parameters through the 'back end'?
The benefits of scheduling a report are negated by the time it takes to setup a report for scheduling.
Any help, hints, suggestions, tips, and comments, are greatly appreciated - I am sick of this tedious and repetitive task!

 

[pgtek]

hi
check this link

http://www.kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html

cheers


pgtek

 

[IdoMillet]

It sounds like you need to generate the same report for multiple offices. Besides a general report scheduling tool (see the list of 3rd part tools under the link pgtek has provided above), you may want to focus your attention on those tools that offer a report "bursting" capability.

This allows you to schedule a single report (grouped by Office) and get 100 exports (one for each office) in a single "pass". Of course, I have a clear bias in relation to that topic... )

Cheers,
- Ido

CUT, Visual CUT, and DataLink Viewer:
view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[helmesjj]

I run a bunch of weekly and monthly reports using a scheduling tool mentioned in the link posted by pgtek. Since most of my reports pull data from last week or last month, I switched to using lastfullweek and lastfullmonth in my select statements. This saves me from the need to change the date range before the scheduled reports run again.

 

[synapsevampire]

You don't need to redo period based parms, use a formula to determine the period.

Not sure why you're using a string for the period, but it would work something like:

picture(totext(month(dateadd("m",-1,currentdate)),0,"&quot,"0&quot+
left(totext(year(dateadd("m",-1,currentdate)),0,"&quot,2)

I'd reconstruct this to assure SQL pass through, AFTER you state technical information, such as Crystal version and database being used.

And if you really do have a date as opposed to passing a period as a string (pretty inefficient way of storing periodicity).

-k