Report subscriptions

IMMS allows users to have reports generated and delivered automatically through a report subscription.

A report subscription is represented in the system as a saved report, where it is specified, that the report should act as a subscription. This way the specification of the report's contents works exactly the same way as for reports pulled manually.

In order to activate subscription for a saved report, the requested time and weekday, or day of month, for the report generation need to be specified. As long as the report subscription is active, the system will at the specified time at the specified weekdays, or day of month, pull the report with the specified parameters.

When the subscription functionality has pulled the report, the result is made available through an email. The email can be sent to a specific email address, or to the email address specified on the user in User administration or under "My details". The email contains a link through which the report can be retrieved. The link in the email can be used multiple times. If the email is forwarded, other users can use the link to access the report.

It is possible to specify for the report subscription, whether an empty report should be sent, if the generated report does not contain any rows. Opting out of empty reports is especially useful for reports, which only occasionally have content, and where special attention should be given, when there actually is content – a kind of notification.

Those of the report's parameters that specify date/time will – like for saved reports in general – work relatively. For example, if a saved report today is specified to pull data from "yesterday", then the report will, when pulled (manually or automatically) at a later time, still give data for "the day before". The time or period of time specified by the parameter will be moved along, as time passes.

The email sent contains information about the specific values applied for the time parameters and the number of rows in the generated report.