stop delivery of empty reports

scheduling XI Scheduler
1

We have over 100 reports being run daily to do some QA on a data source. Today someone opens each Excel produced from the reports to verify they are empty. We want to stop delivery of these to share drive when empty.

Right now we are leaning toward putting an object in each report to cause it to fail in the scheduler due to a division by zero. With the quantity of reports involved I have dismissed some of the other methods I saw due to amount of set up work.

We do not use any alerts because we do not want users to be able to send reports by mail. The mail option is either on or off for that.

BI 4.1 SP4 patch 2 on Windows 2012 servers

Mike Murray :us: (BOB member since 2005-12-23)

2

This would skew any system analysis that you do for comparing successful reports to failed reports as it would increase the numbers of failed reports and make your system look like it is performing worse than it really is.

This is the only option that I know of within Business Objects. From some recent webinars that I have attended, it looks like SAP is finally working on a way to add security to the destination options. You may be able to use this function and limit who can email in BI4.2sp3 or BI4.2sp4.

3

If these reports go out as part of a recurring schedule which is hanging off a publication then:

  • Check Delivery Rules of the Publication
  • for each document set the condition from “Always deliver” to “Deliver only when report contains data”

Changing an option within the publication might require to re-create the recurring schedule - still working in XI 3 where this is the case.

KMB :uk: (BOB member since 2004-02-11)