Report WIZ
Are your R & Ror Crystal
Reports located all over the network ? Do you wish you could categorize
your Reports by Department or User or even restrict User access to some of the
reports with sensitive data ? What if you need to regularly run a data extract
or month-end Report for the Accounts Department out-of-business hours ?
Report WIZ
is definitely your solution. It is an easy to use Business Tool for:
1.
Cataloguing business data,
2. Viewing
business data,
3. Scheduling
business data,
4. Securing business data
Setting up Report WIZ to run
your R & R
Reports or Crystal Reports start with a configuration that gathers information about the report
design - like file name and path, along with desired default runtime options
like Destination (Screen, Printer or Export), Filters, Parameters and
Instructions for Users on how to execute the report. As part of security,
you will also be required to assign the report to a Report Group and give it a
name that Users will recognise it by, at runtime. Report Wiz incorporates a
scheduler for out-of-business hours processing.
Most Schedulers start and
close an application. But what if you need to start the report application and
pass “silent” parameters (like Date Ranges that may change each night) which
restrict data selected in the Report? Report WIZ comes to the rescue! It
stores the Parameters and passes them to the report at runtime. Furthermore, by
use of Date Keywords (like Today, Yesterday, Startweek, etc), you have no need
of changing the date range each day prior to the scheduled run.
Report WIZ's scheduler is capable of setting run frequencies
of Daily, Weekly, Weekdays, Weekends, monthly, fortnightly, month-ends,
quarterly and annually, making the "I forgot" factor a thing of the past.
Details of all 'completed' reports are maintained in a
Run Log along with any error messages that result. These are stored by User.
To provide you with even
more flexibility, all export file names can be configured to dynamically change
each day, thereby preserving the file. For example…- You need to create a file
name with a date portion as in TEST04112002.TXT where the ‘04112002’ is today’s
date in the format ‘mmddyyyy’ or - you need a file name that changes each day
with a different number as in TEST02.TXT where ‘02’ is the day portion (‘dd’) of
today’s date Some Text data exports contain blank lines in the file. This may
result in a ‘crash’ when data is uploaded into your database. Report WIZ is able
to remove these blank lines, just prior to the data export. Report WIZ even
comes with an ‘ad hoc’ file clean up utility that can remove blank lines from
any text file (even if it was not created by your report designer) and if
desired, convert each line in the file to a fixed width that you nominate
between 1 – 10000 characters wide. For security reasons, this facility is only
available to a Report Wiz system administrator.
What if you wanted
to export a delimited file with a delimiter character not available as standard
in your Report Writer? No worries! Report Wiz comes to your rescue. Just create
your report in the Report Designer as a Comma Separated Value (CSV), then
configure Report Wiz to remap the commas to another nominated character (e.g.
'|' - 'pipe' character) before the export is completed.
So you want to send an email
to a list of people advising them the report has completed? No problem.... Just
configure Report WIZ in the Scheduler to include an E-mail with a custom message
to run immediately after the report has completed.
Report WIZ manages Reports
for 2 graphical report-writing tools: Crystal Reports version
8 & R & R Reports version 8.1 upwards.
Here is a summary of
Report WIZ's key features:
- Date Keywords -
parameter date ranges that need changing every day now never
need be change in Unattended reports,
- Dynamic Filename
on Export - Report WIZ can create an Export TEXT filename that
changes each day depending on the initial setup,
- Automatic
Emails - after a report is run with a facility to attach the
file created,
- Auto
incrementing numbers inserted into a Filter Criteria - for
scheduled unattended reports (where say a constant value needs
incrementing)
- Security on
report designs - assign a User to a User group and each report
to a Report Group and relate Users Group to one or many Report Groups
- Dynamic
security on data Security - Data can be filtered based on a
hierarchy of 4 fields added to each table and values inserted into them
that would be matched with the values of the Data entry User. Depending
on the report the SQL will be adjusted to filter out data based on the
User profile
- Reminders when
a report schedule did not run - the next time you start
Report WIZ, it will present you with a list (on login) of all report
that missed the schedule while you were logged out of Report WIZ. This facility
will run the report
without disturbing the usual schedule,
- Automatic entry
of parameters : using Keyboard macros enter the values of the
parameters in the order of Report entry and they are "sent" to the
report writer at runtime
- Remap CSV
exports to any other delimiter character : configure
Report Wiz to change each comma in your export file to an alternative
character prior to completing the export.
R & R Reports is a Trademark of Liveware Publishing
USA
Crystal Reports is a Trademark of Business Objects USA
