Monday, August 28, 2006

Third party scheduling and emailing - 1

Of the many missing "features" of Discoverer is the ability to schedule and email reports. As many of you are are, scheduling can be done using one of a multitude of third-party scheduling tools. The one that I like is the native scheduler that comes with Windows XP.

Coupled with Discoverer Desktop's command-line interface it has always been possible to schedule the execution of a Discoverer workbook and export the output in a selected format, to a named file in a named folder. The difficulty has been in the emailing of that report. While there are a myriad of ways to email something, one of the simplest involves a product called Febooti. I discovered, pardon the pun, this product a few days ago and purchased a commercial license straight away. Now I can honestly say that all of my emailing problems have gone away and I can finally put this issue to bed.

With febooti Command line e-mail you can:
  • Send email from the dos prompt to any number of recipients.
  • Send attached files, text or HTML with embedded pictures.
  • Send email using CC and / or BCC (Blind Carbon Copy).
  • SMTP authentication (PLAIN, LOGIN, NTLM, CRAM-MD5).
  • Secure connections by using -SSL and -STARTTLS.
  • Set SMTP server address and SMTP server port.
Advanced features:
  • Create batch files to send email from any* program.
  • Easy-to-use command line switches with alias support.
  • Unlimited TO, CC and BCC number of recipients.
  • Take parameters from external text file or files.
  • e-update - checks for updates automatically.

I will be posting more information on this subject, including example scripts and a white paper during the coming weeks. For more information see my website (link).

3 comments:

Michael said...

Hi
Oracle has discussed including this ability in a future release but that's as far as it has got so far. I'd like to see it added to the 11g release, scheduled for late 2007.
As for your issue with reports not being the same when run from the command line, if you share your batch files with me using michael@learndiscoverer.com I will take a look and see if there is anything glaring. I have not heard of this happening but I'm willing to research it.

Anonymous said...

Hi Michael,

First of all, im a newbie so apologies in advance if this query sounds stupid.

I am trying to get a Discoverer report to run automatically every day and have the output saved in an XLS file on a local drive. I have read your notes on this topic on your website, which were extremely helpful.

I have created a BAT file which will run the report automatically without connecting to Disco. I am then using windows XP scheduler to try and get it to run this BAT file daily at a given time.
When i run the BAT file manually then it works fine - it outputs the xls file in the correct location as i expect it to. However, when i try and run this bat file through windows schduler then unfortunately it doesnt work.

I get an "0x1" error under the "last result" column in the scheduled tasks window in Windows XP.
I checked the microsoft website to see what this means and i got the following description for this error: "0x1: An incorrect function was called or an unknown function was called".

Unfortunately, i'm still not sure why i am getting this message or what i can do to rectify this problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!! Many thanks for your time and help :)

Regards,

Zaf

Anonymous said...

i am trying to retrieve a report saved in discoverer 10g in an 11g environment but it is not working, please help ...

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