ReportCaster Schedule Blackout Dates

by Jerry Snyder

What if you don’t want ReportCaster to distribute reports on certain days like holidays or end-of-month report processing? You may accomplish this with ReportCaster’s “Schedule Blackout Dates” facility available in Release 7.6.0. In this release, a ReportCaster Administrator can define dates on which schedules are not permitted to run.

From the ReportCaster Development and Administration Interface, a ReportCaster administrator can access the Schedule Blackout Dates facility. The Schedule Blackout Dates facility is a yearly calendar displaying the current year and has the ability to select previous or future years. Within the calendar, clicking on a date highlights the date and selects that date as a one on which schedules are not permitted to be created or run. 

End users can view the calendar to see which dates have been selected as schedule blackout dates but cannot make changes to the calendar. When a user selects to save a schedule they are creating or editing, the first date the schedule will run is verified against the currently defined schedule blackout dates. 

If the first date the schedule will be run is a schedule blackout date, an appropriate message will appear to inform the user that the schedule cannot be saved because the date the schedule will run on is a schedule blackout date.

For each schedule date verification the blackout date file on the Distribution Server is read. This is because ReportCaster Administrators can add or delete blackout dates at any time without having to restart the Distribution Server and reload the ReportCaster web application. 

When the Distribution Server obtains a schedule to run from the ReportCaster repository the schedule date is verified to confirm it is not a schedule blackout date. If the schedule date is a schedule blackout date, the schedule is not run. In addition, the log report for the scheduled job contains an appropriate message to specify that the schedule was not run because the day is a schedule blackout date.

In Release 7.6.1 the Schedule Blackout Dates facility is enhanced to provide ReportCaster Administrators the ability to import schedule blackout dates from a file and to extract schedule blackout dates to an external file.  These enhancements are available from both the calendar interface, which is called from the ReportCaster Development and Administration interface, and also as a command line utility installed in the same location as the Distribution Server.

On Windows these new utilities are accessible from the program menu group option Information Builders, ReportCaster76, Database Migration Utilities submenu.

The next enhancement to ReportCaster Schedule Blackout Dates being developed for a future release is for Managed Reporting group administrators to be able to specify additional blackout dates that apply to specific groups they are authorized to administer. A Managed Reporting Group administrator cannot change the blackout dates defined by a ReportCaster administrator.

Now that you have read this overview of ReportCaster Schedule Blackout Dates, go ahead and start planning the dates you do not want ReportCaster schedules to run on.  Once you’re using ReportCaster in Release 7.6.x you can implement them and relax on those holidays and peak end of month processing periods knowing that ReportCaster schedules won’t be running.