Parametrized .tgr files

debackel · Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 5:06 am Post subject: Parametrized .tgr files

Hi,

First of all, thanks for the great piece of software. I am currently evaluating how it could help us in our reporting implementation.

One thing I'd like to do is to deliver reports "on-demand". A user could request a report simply by sending an e-mail with, as subject, the name of the report.

As a response, the user would get the requested report, by e-mail again.

All this is a matter of tweaking our mail server, for the most part. There is, however, a feature I need from CD for this:
I would like to insert in the .tgr trigger file the e-mail address of the requestor, so that CD delivers the report to the requestor.

Does that make sense?

Thanks in advance for your response,

Laurent.

debackel · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 1:13 am Post subject: Other parameters

In my initial post, I spotted the need to have the destination of the report as a parameter inside the tgr file.

There is also another need, to pass report related parameters inside the .tgr file. This could be the name of the client, the reporting period, etc.

In my case, the report would be triggered by an e-mail containing parameters of the requested report. An Ms Exchange custom action would generate the .tgr file according to the contents of the e-mail.

kgroff · Site Admin

This has be brought up before but I have not added this feature due to the security issues. For example, say you delivering sales reports to your sales people. If the sales people can change the parameters and delivery destination of the report in the trigger file then they could use the system to have another sales person's report delivered to themselves.

debackel · Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 8:47 am Post subject: Security

I believe security has to be built on the infrastructure side.

For example, the parameters file should be in a protected location, with write access given only to those who can run the report and modify input parameters.

This implies, though, that you could specify a trigger folder per report, in order to only allow certain reports to be exported by certain persons (those having write access to the specific folder).

We could also imagine a secret code to insert in the trigger file.

A combination of features (1 trigger folder per report, secret code and parameters in the trigger file) would allow nice deployments.

The one I'm looking for is to allow "reporting on-demand" where one can ask for a report simply by sending an e-mail with the name of the report in the topic. The mail would be parsed, in order to get report parameters and insert them in the trigger file.

If you see other means to realize the same thing in other ways, I am interested.

macheels

I have to agree being able to send parameters to the crystal report would improve the functionality of this product 100%. I am trying to figure out how to get parameters into a report right now, using the date will not work since users are running files back to back. It would be a security issue if I emailed the wrong employee file to the wrong user.

I am currently generating the tgr files from a linux server to windows share using limesurvey to create the tgr file.