Schedule Multiple Reports - Queued vs. time/date

[dotte]

I've used Crystal's scheduler to schedule reports at specific times; however, has anyone written a program to sequentially kick-off reports one-after-the previous report finishes? Any third part product would be appreciated.

Specifically, each month-end, we run approx. 40 reports in a queue (right now we do it manually). Instead of scheduling them all to kickoff at the same time (as it would kill the server) or even 15 minutes apart, I was wondering if anyone has seen a product or written an application that would allow the user to schedule the reports to start after the preceding report was complete? In other words, start the queue of 40 reports with report 1 --- whereas report 2 would not start until report 1 was complete. Then report 3 would start once report two was complete and so forth. We want to avoid starting 40 reports on the same server at the same time. Ideally, we would like a front end that we could monitor the progress of the queue and kill any individual report that may become "hung" however that's a nice-to-have. Anyway, I believe that Crystal's Server product may do something like this, but I would rather not buy that beast for this one function.

Thanks - Dave

 

[kenhamady]

There are a couple of scheduling products out there, some have been mentioned here like CrystalDesk and the one by Chelsea. However I don't know of one that runs the way you describe. Most are keyed by time. Ken Hamady, On-site/Phone Crystal Reports Training/Consulting
Quick Reference Guide to using Crystal in VB

http://www.kenhamady.com/