Automatic report creation

[jfrankovich]

Does anyone know a way to automatically execute a WC report on a schedule and save the output file? I have a few reports that need to be run after hours at the very end of the week and each one will generate an excel file. I'd like to do this without any user interaction. I haven't dug into this much yet but was hoping somebody may have done it before and might save me from going down the wrong path.

Thanks,

John Frankovich

GSI Group

www.gsiag.com<">http://www.gsiag.com>

[SteveVinyard]

Cognos.
You can schedule it to run and then email the report out in a variety of formats automatically.

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Steve Vinyard
Application Engineer

[jfrankovich]

How about without Cognos? We are on WC10.0 but don't have Windchill Business Reporting.
John

[jessh]

Without Cognos you can use workflow or scheduled queues along with the
reporting APIs.

For instance, you could periodically generate a report into iterations
of a WTDocument.

Some coding required, though.

[MikeLockwood]

We run many query builder reports automatically from Excel, with the result dumped to Excel - and for some, saved out as a web page. I saw Al Andersen present on this years ago - and got inspired. We do this for many query builder reports now.
Can do all sorts of tricky things to build the needed URL to pass parameters as needed as well. We have the Excel spreadsheets running all the time on a server and have a macro that kicks off the report each night.

[AL_ANDERSON]

We use Tidal (Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler) to set up jobs to run
Java, SQL, or other programs for this type of thing.

I don't know of any "Windchill" administrative set up option, although I
suppose you could try a workflow running on a timer in a loop that fires
to launch a robot to initiate the report and then return to the timer. My
experience with that kind of workflow timer solution, however, is that
eventually the WfUserWork or WfPropogation queue gets hung up for some
reason, and/or there are errors that are not handled well in that kind of
program resulting in unanticipated problems over time. We find the use of
Tidal jobs much better for any kind of scheduled program runs.

Al

[jfrankovich]

A big thanks to Mike and a shout out to Al as well for being the inspiration. The Excel solution looks like the winner. It will get us operational the quickest and then we will have time to explore some of the other suggested options to get our alternate output formats, email reports, or generate reports as iterations of a WTDoc (which would be really slick for some of these desired reports).
Thanks to all,
John
From: Lockwood,Mike,IRVINE,R&D [

[jessh]

P.S. I'd also generally suggest use of a scheduled queue over use of
workflow timers for such things if you go with a Windchill (as opposed
to Cognos or external) background execution solution.