Bundling different reports to one pdf

[globalbear]

Hi gurus,

We have a situation where the users (controllers) want to bundle several reports into one nice pdf.
They want to be prompted once for their organization unit, period etc, hit run report and be given a bunch of different reports (income statements, production reports etc etc).

These reports are very different concerning their data and they also come from different packages (some relational, some relational/dmr and some Transformer OLAP). But they share some common business entities such as the organization and period dimensions; however these dimensions can look different from a pure technical standpoint. Being a controller I still think business unit A in a cube is the same as business unit A in a relational model.

The current solution is one huge framework with one huge report on top. The finished pdf is 20+ pages long consisting of even more queries and a zillion different data items, filters, slicers etc. 800+ pages of xml-code (multiplied by 10 since we have 10 versions of it) I kid you not ;-)
This is not a good solution in any way but it obviously takes care of the problem where the controllers wants to be prompted once and then get one nice monthly pdf with everything in it.

Now I wonder - what shall we do?
We have tried booklets and they seemed promising but they don't go all the way. We tried to put a prompt page on the master report and than put different report references to the child reports. In 10.2.1 it's not possible to have the same child report several times with different prompts (say you want 4 flavors of the income statement but with some different prompts). This is (maybe) fixed in 10.2.2.
A bigger problem is that we have to base the master report on one package. The single prompt page we want to use has to be in the master report, but then it cannot communicate prompt values to a report based on a different package (in one case the the organization unit is a filter from a database table, in the other it's a MemberUniqueName from a Transformer cube).

So booklets don't take us the whole way.

Schedules might work, but they will give us a lot of different pdf's or even a lot of e-mails with one pdf each. Then the controllers would be flooded with mails and pdf's.

What's more? Office connection? Event studio? One of the new fancy studios? Something else?

To summarize:
How do we prompt several reports built on different packages once, run them and bundle them into one nice pdf?
This is the user side of it.
Also take in mind the development and administration of the darn thing...

I appreciate any advice!

[bdbits]

Since booklets did not work for you, I would look into using MS Office to pull them together. Another possibility would be the SDK, if you have developer resources for it.

I might have suggested a Workspace, but I am not sure if you can export an entire workspace to a PDF even in 10.2.2. Maybe someone else will know if that is possible and viable.