Read from flat file and run a report

[John1234]

Hi ALL,

I will be recieving a flat file every morning with a value 0 or 1 in it at 6:45 AM. I need to schedule a report to user at 7:AM based on the value in the flat file. If its 0 I will run report A , if its 1 I will run report B.

Report A and Report B are already created.

So how to do I read the flat file value and then schedule a report based on it.

Thanks,

[BigChris]

Hi,

Are you going to save your file to your datawarehouse? Are you going to overwrite the file each day? Is that file then going to be available in a package?

Depending on your answers I would imagine you'd want to create an event in Event Studio that you then schedule to run at 7am, either with a manual schdedule or else with a trigger that fires on your server.

[John1234]

Yes the file will be written on a falt file in cognos server and it will be overwritten everyday.But I am not bringing it to my package. I am using cognos transformer.

Can event studio go read a flat file and then schedule a run .

Thanks,

[Lynn]

Yes the file will be written on a falt file in cognos server and it will be overwritten everyday.But I am not bringing it to my package. I am using cognos transformer.

Can event studio go read a flat file and then schedule a run .

Thanks,

Events are triggered by expressions you author against packages. Any use of files within the Cognos tools requires that you create a data source and model the information. Even the external data feature has a small modeling and package publishing step as part of the process.

What if the delivery of your flat file fails? You'd still have the old file sitting there from yesterday and you may not know it is stale unless you build something to consider that situation into your processing.

Is it possible to take a step back and find out what the basis for the 0 or 1 is on a particular day and then model whatever is needed to determine that directly from the source? Then you can more reliably decide whether to run report A or B.

If you absolutely must rely on an external file that magically appears (or not) on a daily basis then I think Chris is on the right track suggesting you bring the information into your data warehouse. This process should also include a time stamp so you know whether the flag is current or not when compared with the system date. Then bring the flag and the date information into your package and use it as the basis for an event condition in Event Studio.