Schedule a report with parameter

[Former Member]

Hope this isn't a silly question - I'm very much a new boy to Business Objects.

I have a report that the user wants to have run weekly. However, the report prints weekly data forecasts for the current week and for a number of weeks to come - probably 12. The only way I've found to limit the query is using an actual date prompt when running the report to restrict the query range.

I could probably schedule individual occurences, but this would be quite an overhead. Is there a way to schedule the report and pass in a parameter of (today + 12 weeks) or something similar?

TIA

Malcolm

[former_member142702 · Accepted solution]

Theoretically speaking you can schedule your report with whatever parameter value you want. The important thing is that your report should be able to identify your input and output the results for the next 12 weeks ( in a single report). The way to go is to modify the report and allow it to display data for the next X weeks. You should build in a prompt in your report that prompts the user to enter the number of weeks she/he ants to see in your report.

What kind of data sources does your report fecth data from?

Regards,

Stratos

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Stratos, Dave . Thanks so much for the replies. I eventually managed to get my crosstab report to count the number of weeks - RunningCount() didn't seem to work - it displayed the week numbers, but on filtering only showed me the first one! Had to do the calculation manually. Dave - we do have (luckily) a current date in the universe, and there is another date field for input, but haven't really been able to use it, so I'll be following up on your links with great interest. We're totally locked out of the universe at present - can't even edit the sql or I'd be happy. Still, I must try and contact then negotiate with the designers.

[Former Member]

There are a couple of approaches that you can take, but both require some assistance from your universe designer. For the first approach, your universe designer can create date-based objects like "today" or "start of this week". These objects would be based on database functions (like sysdate for Oracle or getdate() for SQL Server) that return the date of "today" and perform other operations on that value to turn it into various date ranges. You can then make conditions on these objects.

Another approach is to create what I (and others) call a "Magic date" which is used in prompts. When the report is run interactively you can enter any date you want. When the report is scheduled, the "magic date" value is entered instead. By using this technique you can have one report that runs both interactively and in batch. The magic date is converted to today's date when the report is run, so as each week expires and a new week starts the report will run for that new week automatically. Yet the report can still be run interactively by entering any other date.

I have a number of blog posts on [dynamic date objects|http://www.dagira.com/category/design/dynamic-dates/] as well as the [magic date process|http://www.dagira.com/2008/07/21/using-a-magic-date-value-in-prompts/] that can provide more material for you (or your universe developer) to read.