Placing some report data in an e-mail subject

[JoshuaRodd]

I am in the process of migrating some reports from a classical Perl script in a cron job that e-mails people to a Cognos report. The current reports look like this:

From: reports@example.com
Subject: New customers this week: 1,234
Date: July 12, 2010

New customers this week: 1,234
For details, click the attachment.

new_customers_2010-07-12.xls

Our Cognos BI person is telling me that it's impossible to put any data in the Subject: line. Unfortunately, this significantly reduces the usability for our users. For example, an executive gets this report and just looks in the subject line in his Blackberry before throwing the e-mail away. It's a great deal more trouble to open up an e-mail on a Blackberry and then open an attachment.

Is there any way to do this? It's a bit hard to believe that a mish-mash of Perl & cron jobs are more capable than a fancy Cognos setup.

Thanks in advance,
Joshua Rodd

[apsley]

You can place data items in the subject line and body of an email when you use Event Studio. This also allows you to attach multiple reports and send one one email; such as "Subject: Week 37 reports attached". However, the data item needs to return just one value (otherwise you will receive an email for every row returned from the db) and I don't think you can burst the report from Event Studio.