Setting Up Report Email

Assuming you've set all of your SMTP details correctly in your settings file, you'll most likely want to send out occasional reports via email.

The Report List Addon is designed to handle large numbers of reports - allocating individual reports to each person is a time-consuming task that would usually result in problems.

So the reporting system uses bundles - which are pre-configured sets of reports that a person might be interested in.

To create a report bundle, go to your reports directory and open the subs folder.

Here is where all of the email subscription information is stored. There are two types of file - .sub are individual subscriptions, and .bundle files that define your bundles.

A bundle file is simply a text file that lists of the report folders that are part of the bundle.

If we had the following report folders…

* temp_totals
* fault_summaries
* production
* kpis

…then we can make a bundle that sends simply the two upper-management reports, kpis and production.

Create a file called 'management.bundle', open it in your text editor of choice, and enter the following…

This means that people subscribed to the management bundle will be sent the KPI and Production reports, in that order.

To subscribe a user to one or more report bundles, you use the ARDI web interface.

Go to Administration | Report Subscription Settings

Simply enter the users email address - ideally in lower-case, and without the domain. So to register fred_nurks@somewhere.com, you would simply enter fred_nurks.

You'll then be able to choose which bundles to send to that user.

When you send an email report, copies of the report will be saved so they can be accessed from the web interface. By default, the last 14 days of bundled reports will be available to end users.

If needed, you can customise your email footers for each of your different bundles.

Now that you've set up your email, it's time to schedule your reports.