Can WebI reports be batch scheduled w/o a custom solution?

JSW · Senior Member Joined: 15 Jan 2013 Posts: 81

Hi,

We are running BO 4.2 SP2. This may be a very basic question, and this may not be the correct forum for it, but here goes.

I have done some basic report scheduling, but only for things like scheduling a report once a month. A recent project requires running a WebI report approximately 250 times on the first of the month. It needs to produce Excel reports for approximately 250 customers, based on a list of account numbers that could change monthly. The plan is to FTP these Excel files to a third party, who will handle the security and distribution to our customers.

This seems pretty straight forward to me, but I've done a lot of research over the past several weeks, and I can't find a good solution to batch schedule one report based on a list of account numbers. I'm really hoping to avoid having to create 250 individually scheduled reports!

I realize SAP provides a SDK that could provide a means of doing this, but we are trying to avoid a custom solution. At first the SAP Publisher Service seemed promising, but from everything I've seen, that is only for Crystal Reports. I've also looked at report bursting, but that seems to be designed to distribute a single report to a dynamic list of recipients.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to schedule a single WebI report, that uses a dynamic list of accounts for input and produces individual reports, without using the SDK or another custom solution?

Thank you very much for your help!

Marek Chladny

Hi,

Check Publications.

JSW · Senior Member Joined: 15 Jan 2013 Posts: 81

Hi Marek,

Below is a screenshot of my WebI prompt for the report I need to schedule. It will require 250 individual Contract Account numbers (one report run per customer). The second prompt is calculated by the BEx Query, and defaults to the prior month, which is what we want to run it for.

I've also included a screenshot of the Prompt Summary from the Publication setup. For the Contract Account, it says "To be processed by database server". I'm not sure what that means, and I haven't been able to find an explanation of it. Is there a way to dynamically populate the prompt at runtime by using a BEx Query, list of accounts in Excel, csv file, etc?

Thanks for your help!