Can you email a report from a workflow?

Here is a question that was brought to me and it’s an interesting one of course. I would assume that most places would probably find this useful especially when a PO or PR is approved and having it email a BIRT report in Maximo 7 automatically.  It would be a great feature to have.

I don’t have a solution for you guys, but here are my initial thoughts on this. You know that you can already schedule and email BIRT reports so I’m thinking there must be a way to do this from the back end as well.  If you think about how this BIRT report scheduling works, then you can probably see where I’m going with this.  The way this scheduling and emailing PDF reports is this, it saves the report information in the database and a CRON task is probably running in the background continuously checking for reports that need to be run.  The CRON task will take care of running the report and emailing it to the user you specify.  I do know that there is a MBO called “REPORTSCHED” which is the table that holds all the schedule BIRT report information such as report name, email users, timezone, email subject, etc.  So what I’m thinking, you may be able to use escalations or a custom action from a workflow that will get the info needed from a PO or PR and insert a record into this table to automatically schedule and email reports.  Now that I’m thinking, this may require some custom java classes to get it to work, but I think this is certainly achievable.

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16 thoughts on “Can you email a report from a workflow?

  1. I did this already. Created custom action class that builds report, attaches to the email and sends it. There is no need to do scheduling. Check how to build report from java classes and the rest is easy.

      1. I believe he isn’t actually calling a report object and sending that as a PDF. I think he is just querying the database and then just sending that information in an email format and sending it that way. I could be wrong though.

  2. You can do this in 7.5  It allows for actions as well as notifications within Work Flow.  You can really make this very robust.  I’ve developed email templates that pull variables form work orders and it can email people within the work flow information without even having to have anyone log into Maximo.  This functionality is out of the box, but does take some configuring.

  3. hi,
    How r U?
    i m in one issue.
    actually i want send one pdf to multiple user from Eclipse BIRT or maximo automatic.
    Means i will show email id on the report top & PDF auromatic send to that onlr email id.
    Thanks in advance

  4. Hi, I just want to ask related to this regarding scheduling reports and send email with pdf attachment, it works the sample automation script provided By IBM but, the PDF attached has no data row fetched meaning its empty but the report header is there. thanks if you have some additional information on this. But to use custom java classes for me it is really troublesome to do it.

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