Summary:
This article gives details on how to setup and use Solver's Publisher feature in the Cloud portal. Publisher allows you to distribute reports and report packages to users or a group of users belonging to a role in the system.
Reports can be run and distributed at a predefined time, or you can manually initiate running as required. You can add multiple reports to a publishing job, set parameters, and send them to email recipients or send them to their Archive feature in the portal. Publisher generates a log for all runs, enabling you to keep an overview of your report executions.
You can also edit your existing publishing jobs. For example, you can add or delete reports from the job or add or delete recipients.
The Scheduling feature allows you to set up a schedule for your publishing jobs to send reports at a predefined time interval.
Article Sections:
Method:
Please contact your salesperson if you have not purchased the Publisher feature. Once it has been purchased and processed, the Publisher module will appear in the Cloud portal.
Setup
Create a Publisher Subscription
Publisher subscriptions consist of report and recipients. One subscription can send reports to one or more recipient's Archive or email.
After clicking the New icon in the upper right-hand corner, users are taken to the Publisher Subscription wizard. The user is prompted for:
- Name: This is a user-friendly name that will appear in the subject line of the publisher report.
- Description: an optional field, its contents will not appear in the email/Archive item received.
- Company:
- In cases where an organization only has one company, this will pre-populate with the company
- In cases where the organization has multiple companies, click the dropdown to choose a company
- Templates: from the dropdown, select the template(s) that are to be distributed to end-users.
Note: Only published reports will run. A draft report can be selected but may not run in Publisher. - Take note of the Security Context dropdown that has appeared. There are two options:
- Context of the “recipient”: choosing this option results in the distributed report inheriting the security settings as defined in Settings > Administration for the recipient. This is the most common option and should be used in most cases to ensure that recipients are viewing only the data allowed.
- Context of “me” (the creator): choosing this option results in the distributed report inheriting the security permissions of the user creating the subscription. Use caution when choosing this option. If you are an admin user with full access to data, selecting this option will result in users receiving reports with all financial information shown.
- Parameters: After selecting the templates, choose the parameter values.
Note: All parameters across all reports will be shown. If the same parameter is used across multiple reports, it will only appear once - Recipients: Choose who should be a recipient of the templates attached from either the list of users or roles.
- Destination: Choose where the Publisher subscription should go. As the creator of the subscription, you have two options:
- Users’ Email
- Users’ Archive
At this point, you have successfully created a subscription. You can save it and it will run, but it has not been scheduled.
Scheduling a Subscription
- First, enable the scheduler by clicking the toggle button. Solver Publisher scheduler will appear.
- Choose the frequency. Users are prompted to provide the start date and time with three additional options:
- Hourly: send a Publisher subscription every 1, 2, 3, 6 or 12 hours
- Daily: send a Publisher subscription every 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 days
- Monthly: choose the month(s) and whether it should go out on
- First Day
- Last day
- Specific date
- Specific day of a week
Click Save to save your subscription. It will now run at the set scheduled time.
Common issues/Troubleshooting
When troubleshooting Publisher, consider the following:
-
Is there an error and what does it say? Can it help you troubleshoot?
-
Does the publisher subscription distribute to others? If so, check security, etc.
-
If #2 does not work, send the Publisher Subscription to archive. If it distributes to archive this means that the application is working, we are just not able to email the user > Ask the user to verify the email is not being blocked or going to spam. If the customer states it's not blocked, then submit it to support. It may be a dev issue.
Common issue: Publisher Could Not Send Reports by Email...
A user gets the following error when trying to use Publisher in Private Host 5.x.
Run the Publishing Service as a user with SMTP access by:
- Navigating to Start Services BI360 Publishing Service
- Right-click Properties
- Change the Log On to a user with SMTP access
- Click Apply
- Click OK
Properties:
Publisher
Cloud