Setting Up Report Bursting for Designer Reports

Report bursting is the process of creating a single base report that delivers different results to each person viewing that report. For example, you could create a report for sales in all sales regions by sales representative. When the report is distributed, it is customized for each sales representative to contain only information about the customers in the sales rep's region. 

To set up report bursting, you create two reports:

A report with the content you want to distribute.

A distribution report containing the email addresses of the recipients. In addition, the distribution report contains a column with a column name that matches a filtered column parameter in the content report. This column is used to customize or limit the content that recipients receive.

High-Level Steps to Set Up Report Bursting

    • Create a schedule to run your content report and have it distributed to the recipients in the distribution report.

To create the content report

1. In the Designer module, create the report that will be bursted. This is the content report that you want to distribute.

The example shows a content report. The report will be broken out by Employee Full Name.
2. Add a filter to the column you want to filter on, for example, Employee Full Name. In this example, each employee will receive a report containing only the information that pertains to that employee.
3. Select Display as the Filter Type and check the Prompted box. Selecting Display as the Filter Type makes the report run only once.

To ensure the prompt value is passed properly you need to change the prompt name to match the column name as in the example below.

  
4. Save the report.  

To create a data source with the necessary columns for the distribution report

5. If the information does not already exist in Birst, create a file (such as an Excel spreadsheet) containing the column Email with the email addresses of the users to whom you want to distribute the report.

Multiple values need to be separated by a semi-colon.

Important: The Email column must use this exact name.
6. Include a column that matches a filtered column parameter in the content report, such as Employee Full Name.
7. Upload the new source to Infor and process. No joins are necessary. See Uploading Flat Files.In the Help see Uploading Flat Files.

To create the distribution report

1. In the Designer module, create a new report and add Email as the first column.

Important: The logical name of the column must be "Email". It's not sufficient to rename the column in the report.
2. Add another column to the report that is the column you are using to filter the content report. Employee Full Name is used in the example below. In this case, the content report will filter the data based on Employee Full Name, so when the report is scheduled, a report for each employee will be sent to the email address associated with the Employee Full Name. (In this example, the Email column contains the same email address for each employee. In practice, it would contain a different email address for each employee.)

Important: The report must contain a table and no chart.
3. Save the report.

To create a schedule to run the content report and distribute it based on the distribution report

1. Click Admin to switch to the Admin module.
2. Click the Manage Access tab, then click Report Scheduler.
3. Create a new schedule or modify an existing schedule.
4. In the Report tab, select the report you want to be distributed in the Content Report field.
5. For Distribution, select Report Driven then select the report you created as your distribution list.
6. Complete the rest of the information in the other tabs for the report schedule, then click Save.

Tip: You can use a report parameter in the email subject in order to use the prompt value from the report to customize the subject. For example:
Customer Listing for $P{Employee Full Name}
7. To test the report, select the report schedule on the Report Scheduler page then click Actions, Run Now. When the report is run, each email recipient will receive a customized report containing information on their customers, as in the example below:



Caveat: In this example, each report was sent to the same email address.

See Also
Defining Filters
Scheduling Reports in Admin
Setting Up Exception Reporting