Cognos Impromptu 5 - How do I get all the scheduled tasks to run at the same time? 1

[s2poon]

Hi,

I inherited this program when the previous user left the company.
I sometimes need to have all the schedule tasks run again in the morning. There's about 25 of them.
Is there an easy way to do this without activating each .imr file in the C:] drive individually and then saving the .XLS on at a time?

Thank you.

s2poon

 

[drlex]

In short; no.

Glib answers are never that helpful, so let me expand:

An alternative method would be to re-run the tasks within Cognos Scheduler by inserting new tasks based on the existing - these will inherit all the output criteria.
Downsides are that you'd
1) need to make Scheduler visible if it's running or else have to end it and restart it;
2) still need to go through the list of tasks, right-clicking to create the new tasks;
3) possibly have issues with concurrent jobs locking resources (impromptu, excel);
4) have to delete all the new tasks.
So not really an improvement!

If the need to re-run is regular, a better way to do this would be to use CognosScript (almost identical to Visual Basic) in a Cognos Macro to run the Impromptu reports - one macro per report and/or one macro for all reports - and then use Scheduler to call the macro(s). In the case of failure, you can then just run the multiple report macro to generate all reports consecutively (thus avoiding locking issues). Macros also have the advantage of allowing conditional runs and post-processing tasks - tidying up Excel reports is one example.

I ended up using scheduled DTS jobs in SQL Server to call macros, due to the increasing complexity of user scheduling demands.

The Macro editor (edMacro32.exe) should be found in the path C:\Program Files\Cognos\cer2\bin on a regular Windows installation of Series5. The documentation (again, from a standard install) should be in C:\Program Files\Cognos\cer2\documentation and comprises .pdf files - look at cgspmac.pdf and imp_mac.pdf

(FWIW, Series 5 Cognos must be almost 15 years old, so don't be surprised by lack of sophistication!)

soi là, soi carré

 

[s2poon]

Thank you very much drlex.

Sorry for the lateness of my thanks.

 

[drlex]

No problem; thanks for the star!

soi là, soi carré