Report bursting - dynamically changing e-mail subject

[Jacobus]

Hi there,

We are bursting a report to a few hundred e-mail recipients, and as such each recipient may receive more than one e-mail. Now, we would like to dynamically change the e-mail subject line, to include the burst key, so that a recipient with many e-mails can easily differentiate between them.

Has anyone done something similar to this before? Perhaps dynamically changing the report name instead - which would then be reflected on the e-mail subject line?

Thanks for any help!

[almeids]

My one cent on the subject (I don't have 2 cents of expertise to offer on bursting or the SDK but spoke with a colleague who does):

You are unlikely to be able to do this with Cognos' burst-to-email functionality even with the SDK; you'd have to get into the bursting/email processing after bursting but before mailing which doesn't seem feasible.

Dynamically changing the report name will not help, the subject line comes from the schedule and is only populated with the report name when the schedule is created.  Even if you can dynamically change the schedule, that's still a single point of maintenance for the entire distribution and won't give you the granularity you need, which gets back to inserting yourself in the bursting/emailing process.

One possibility would be to burst-to-save by group and then automate something with the SDK to gather the report outputs from the content store and do the mailing yourself.  It looks like you'd have to do the group explosion yourself and get the users email addresses (in ReportNet; maybe C8 SDK has mail-to-group method or functionality).

If you find a solution please post back, this definitely falls into the "good to know" category.

[almeids]

I thought of a possible fallback solution I should have mentioned...

You didn't say what format you were mailing the reports in, but if it's a pdf or excel attachment you could add an html "cover sheet" which includes the identifying attribute.  It won't show up in the subject, but will in the email client preview pane for those who use it; those who don't can see it by opening the email without having to open the attachment.  We do this to include a summary page in some of our (non-burst) emailed financial reports.

This is assuming things still work the same in C8 as ReportNet.  You add a conditional layout dependent on a variable based on the ReportOutput function...your existing report pages go into (let's say) the "PDF" layout, and your burst key or whatever you want goes onto a new page in the "HTML" layout.  In the schedule, select both output formats, and you get the PDF as an attachment and the HTML as the body.

HTH.

[praveennb]

Have you tried using event studio to schedule the reports?.

Using Event studio you can change the Subject header.

[Jacobus]

Thanks for the replies.  :)

Almeids, I tried your fallback solution (using Cognos 8.2) -- my main report output is in PDF. I created the conditional formatting, and without bursting it works fine, but the bursting creates an additional e-mail for the PDF attachment i.e. one e-mail (HTML) is send with my burst key info in the e-mail body, and another email with the PDF detail attached!

Something else I tried is to select both 'Include a link to the report' and 'Attach the report' in the e-mail options in the report schedule, and in this case, the link in the email body equals the burst key. So, this may help, although the report recipients may not have Cognos access, so clicking on the link may raise questions!

BI007, can you dynamically change the subject line in Event Studio?