An alternative of sending heavy Excel/PDF files as an email attachment to Business Users from BOBJ Schedular

Hi All,

Just thought of sharing an issue with the heavy reports’ publication /Scheduling and a potential solution or workaround that can be used by IT teams.

Issue : When you want to schedule heavy reports’ and want to share the scheduled output of the report via email to users, the schedules/ publications FAIL 🙁 with some SMTP errors.

There is a workaround to that can help IT teams dealing with scheduling WebI reports, with a huge data set and want to distribute the report via. email to Business users.

The solution is as follows :

1. Schedule the WebI report ( format = Excel)
2. Send the email to the users from BOBJ Schedular
3. Don’t send the ( big excel) file in attachment rather send the “Document Link” of the scheduled output (in excel format) of the report

The trick here is to send the “Document Link” such that every-time it retrieves the latest instance of the document and ignores all historical instances.

Here is the way to get this static “Document Link” to the latest instance of the document  :

http://BOBJPRODSERVER:8080/BOE/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?sIDType=CUID&iDocID={16 digit CUID}&sInstance=Last

Example : My WebI document’s “Document Link” is :

http://BOBJPRODSERVER:8080/BOE/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?sIDType=CUID&iDocID=Ftf9K1sYbwMA69oAAABXEqpFAFBWAUbj

Then the LINK which will always give me the last scheduled instance of this report would be  –

http://BOBJPRODSERVER:8080/BOE/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?sIDType=CUID&iDocID=Ftf9K1sYbwMA69oAAABXEqpFAFBWAUbj&sInstance=Last

Using this understanding, Just copy and paste  the link of Latest Instance ( always) in the email body of the outgoing email, as follows :

Advantages :

• You don’t have to FTP any report, upload the report output to shared drive and the overhead of maintaining an FTP location and its security is eliminated.

• Even if the email ( with the scheduled report) is forwarded to someone who is not an authorised user, the link won’t open because it requires the user to authenticate against BOBJ repository. Hence data security is reinforced.

• Heavy network traffic because of sending large files over email can be avoided.

Cheers!

Ashish