Execute Print Report from TI in Express 9.5.2

[pablo]

Hi,

I have checked for a solution to this on the forum and other websites but cannot seem to find a simple solution.

2 challenges:

1:

Is it possible to execute a print report from TI?

I have three different types of reports that needs be be printed ( It is employee letters - 280 of them).

My thinking is to create a distribution cube with employee in that is linked to the Remuneration cube also per employee. In the Distribution cube I will have a measure with values from 1-5 depending on what type of income an employee received and this drives the type of letter to be printed for that employee.

I have the Distribution cube working and a TI that reads a view from the Distribution cube to create the subsets to be assigned to a print job and each job prints a different letter based on the subset.

2:
If I can get challenge 1 correct:

Then is it possible to have a string email input in the Distribution cube that is the email of each employee and by running a TI you can print his report and email report to the employee.

Long shot but worth a try I think??

[David Usherwood]

1:

Is it possible to execute a print report from TI?

No.
'Print Report' is a rather fragile client side tool. TI runs server side.

2:
If I can get challenge 1 correct:

Thus N/A

[lotsaram]

Is it possible to execute a print report from TI?

Well not directly. Remember TI runs on the server and can do pretty much anything within the Tm1 database but little outside it without resorting to executing batch files and vbs scripts. While it is possible that TI could call a vbs that would open an Excel file, connect to TM1, produce a report then email it this is not a solution I would normally endorse.

The way I have done this in the past is to use the windows scheduler utility to launch Excel, then VBA in Excel takes care of the logon to TM1 and looping through various subsets and saving static reports in output folders with a defined naming convention. Knowing what the naming convention is and matching a file name and location to recipient is no problem and TI to run the email sending can then be scheduled to run after the window in which all the reports are prepared.

is it possible to have a string email input in the Distribution cube that is the email of each employee and by running a TI you can print his report and email report to the employee?

This I would very much say yes to, but again you would need ExecuteCommand with a 3rd party email application on the server and pass in parameters typically for to, subject, body and attachment.

Note you said you wanted to send letters. TM1 only has a connector in Excel, as far as I know there is no equivalent for word. If you don't mind sending a letter in an Excel document then no problem, but the best alternative here would probably be to again use a bit of good old VBA again in the Excel report bursting routine to either print the Excel to PDF or in later versions of Excel to save as PDF.

But on the whole quite doable, just not out of the box, you have to cobble things together with script and VBA, but then that's what consultants are for!