FTP a scheduled report output

[cogman]

Hi;

I have few reports that are scheduled daily and are mailed to business users.Now the business users wants the report outputs to be uploaded to a website where everyone can access without login into reportnet.Can anyone help me..how i can achieve it.

Thks for your help...

[Blue]

Just make the output type as PDF in the settings when creating the schedule.  Or you can make PDF the default output type of the report in Connection.  If PDF is no good then you can output to Excel format.

[COGNOiSe administrator]

You will have to do some coding ... JAVA, VB or C#. Eventually AJAX (JavaScript).

[lloydke]

We have had similar requests in Cognos 8.1.2  I hear that this functionality is being looked at in later versions 8.3 + ? but is not there yet.  You have to either leverage the SDK to do this or see if your client would be happy to link to a URL on the cognos server.  You can do a lot with the URL so that it returns whatever format(pdf, xls, html) you want with or without cognos titles etc.

[*NL*]

We did exactly the same thing in a project a while back.

We ended up using a FTP client to pick up the pdf's in a certain folder at the desired time and FTP them to the right location.
What you'll be looking for is a client that allows scheduling. The advantages of using the FTP client are that it will keep on trying to FTP the files (or folders) even if the connection fails the first time, and the logging of the transfers was another desire the client full filled.

[TCM]

We too have done this. By default ReportNet sends scheduled reports to C:/reports, so we created a Pearl script to check this folder for certain reports and if it finds them, FTP them to the website. The script is scheduled to run every 10 minutes and after the reports are placed on the website they are moved from C:/reports to an archive folder in the C drive. A log file is also created each time the script runs. This has worked well for us.

[jeemalif]

The way we had implemented this was using Content Manager -->Advanced Settings and adding parameter CM.OUTPUTSCRIPT and CM.OUTPUTLOCATION. Every time a report is saved the script/program is invoked whose name is mentioned in the CM.OUTPUTSCRIPT along with two parameters; the name of the report output file and a description file in xml format. These two files have generic names and are unique everytime. We have Reportnet installed on a solaris machine, so we have given the location of /tmp and the script is a korn shell script. The description file is parsed using shell and awk commands to find out the report name, then if the name is of the intentded report then we call the ftp sub-routine to ftp the file. At the end, we remove the output file and the description file.

If you are interested in more details, send me an email javed.iqbal@twcable.com and I'll be happy to be of any help.

--Javed