Report bursting

Report bursting is the process of creating a single base report that delivers different results to each person who is viewing that report. For example, you can 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 to distribute.
  • A distribution report that contains 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.

Distribution reports must contain a table and no chart, and should contain an Email column in the table. The Email column contains the email addresses of the recipients. For multiple email recipients, the email addresses must be separated by a semicolon.

An optional column in the distribution report is Username and can be used to specify one space user to receive the report. The Username column is only used if there is not an Email column or if the Email column is empty. Use the Username column to specify which users to send the notification to if the Email column is not available or is missing data. The user in the Username column must be a member of the space with a valid email.

Username and Email must be the name of the columns. It is not sufficient to rename those columns in the report.

At a high level, these are the steps for setting up report bursting:

  1. Create the content report to be distributed with a filter on the column to use to filter the data.
  2. If the data does not exist, upload a data source, for example, an Excel spreadsheet, with the Email column and another column that matches the filtered column parameter in the content report.
  3. Create the distribution report to use to distribute the content report.
  4. Create a schedule to run your content report and send to the recipients in the distribution report.
  5. Optionally, test the notification.