Problem statement:
Our customer wanted reports to be emailed to end users, but it should only happen when there is new data and not on a timely basis.
Generally, most of the BI tools offer scheduling capabilities of reports / dashboards but on a timely basis but this kind of custom business requirement cannot be met with a traditional BI tool. But that’s not the case with Helical Insight. Read below to learn how such a use case was handled using Helical Insight.
Solution Proposed:
The proposed solution for the said problem was to schedule the reports based on data change and not on time.
Solution Application:
The proposed Solution can be achieved by using Helical WorkFlow (HWF) since the requirement is not an out-of-the-box feature of Helical Insight. Using Helical Workflow any functional module of the tool Helical Insight can be triggered (like emailing, exporting, logging in, data visualization etc).
The flow of the solution is as follows:
- Whenever an ETL is run to upload the data, it will return a success or failure message, which will imply if the data has been loaded (changed) or not.
- If the ETL runs successfully and the data is loaded, the ETL will return a success message.
- This success message will trigger the HWF file containing the scheduling and emailing functions.
- The HWF will then email the required reports by applying input parameters with the configured to, subject etc to the end users email id.
Flow of the HWF:
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- Configure the email module to the logged in users’ credentials.
There should be a file containing the configuration for emailing, from which the HWF will get the configuration details.
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- Configure recipients’ details.
There should be a configuration file containing the recipients to whom the reports are to me mailed, from which the HWF will get the recipient list
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- Schedule the reports to run immediately and email it to the recipient.
Another configuration file should contain the list of reports that are to be emailed, so the HWF schedules and emails only those reports.
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