Looking to see if there is a best practice for using ReportC...

[Chad Smith]

Looking to see if there is a best practice for using ReportCaster to run a fex 7 days before the end of the month.

Traditionally we setup ReportCaster to run the fex multiple days in a row and instruct the code to bypass the output if the run date is not 7 days from the end of the month. On the one day out of the month where the condition is met, a report is distributed to the requestor.

Is there a better way to do this by strictly using ReportCaster to make the decision to run or not It seems overkill to run it several days in a row.

Thanks for any suggestions you can offer.

[Martin Yergeau]

Are you using the Alert feature

[Chad Smith]

No, I have never used an Alert.

[Martin Yergeau]

Basically, an Alert will trigger an event (report) based on a certain condition and will check for the condition as many time as requested.

See chapter 6 from this document (page 893) Users Guide

and chapter 4 from this one (page 181) Report Caster

[John Gelona]

Another way it to use a pre-processing fex. The 7th day before the end of the month will be one of the following:

 

the 21st in Feb or 22nd in a Leap Year.

the 24th of Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Aug, Oct or Dec

the 23rd of Apr, Jun, Sep or Nov

 

Set the job in RC to run on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th.

In the pre-processing fex see if the run date is the 7th day befor the end of the month (lots of ways to do this). If it is allow the job to run. If not, set the &&KILL_RPC to Y and the job will stop. The only catch is if the job has multiple tasks, you have to do the pre-processing fex before every task. (Ive had a NFR in for this for about 5+ years).

We do this a lot. We have jobs that run on a given Business day of the Month which takes into account weekends and holidays.

[SATHEESH B]

Create schedule to run everyday.

In the pre-processing add the functionality to get the current date ,get the end of month then find the difference .

-SET &DT_CURR = &YYMD;

-SET &DT_EOM = DATECVT(DATEMOV(DATECVT(&DT_CURR,I8YYMD,YYMD),EOM),YYMD,I8YYMD);

-SET &DIFF_DT=DATEDIF(&DT_CURR,&DT_EOM,D);

 

-TYPE &DT_CURR

-TYPE &DT_EOM

-TYPE &DIFF_DT

-SET &MESSAGE=IF &DIFF_DT LT 7 THEN Run ELSE do not run;

-TYPE &MESSAGE