Work on our next release (3.0.6) is under way. We want to give you an overview of some important features that are ready and will be available with ReportServer 3.0.6, released in a couple of weeks:

• Scheduling
• The Conditional Scheduling
• Object Resolver Query
• Perfomance
• Language support

Scheduling

It’s getting even better! The scheduling mechanism is greatly extended in ReportServer 3.0.6. This is a step on the way to the future n:m scheduling mechanism (n reports to m recipients in a single job).

Now, the scheduler administrator is able to set three different scheduling actors:

• The executor: the executor is the user as which the report will be executed. Thus, this determines the permissions during report execution. Until ReportServer 3.0.5, the executor was always the user that originally scheduled the report. What happens when the user leaves the organization? In the past, all scheduled jobs had to be completely created from scratch by the new executor. With ReportServer 3.0.6, the scheduler administrator is able to simply change the executor by a couple of clicks. Much easier and much more flexible.
• The owners: the owners are users that are able to change a scheduled job. Until now, there was only one owner: the user that originally scheduled the report. So, apart from this user, only scheduler administrators were able to change a scheduled job. But what happens when the job owner is out of office for some weeks, e.g. in vacation? Only scheduler administrators were able to change his/her jobs. Now, multiple owners can be defined and these don’t have to have scheduler administrator permissions in order to change a job.
• The recipients: Recipients are the users that get the scheduled report e.g. by e-mail. This has not been changed in ReportServer 3.0.6.

In the following screenshot you can see the new scheduling dialog.

The Conditional Scheduling

Useful improvements were made regarding conditional scheduling, which is much more flexible and powerful in ReportServer 3.0.6. The administrator is now able to create predefined scheduled conditions via scripting. The user just has to select the condition needed and that’s it. No more formula typing for the user, which improves user experience and avoids common errors. Of course, the previous scheduling mechanism is further supported.

As a standard predefined scheduler condition, we offer the “not empty” condition shown in the following screenshot.

As you can see, the report is only executed if the report is not empty.

It is important to emphasize that completely new conditions may be created by scripting. As an example, please take a look at the following simple script.
It allows report execution during working days, while during the weekend report execution is disabled.

import net.datenwerke.rs.condition.service.condition.hooks.ConditionProviderHook;
import net.datenwerke.rs.condition.client.condition.dto.SimpleCondition;
import java.util.Calendar;
 
def HOOK_NAME = "IS_WORKINGDAY_HOOK"
 
def callback = [
 provideConditionFor: { report ->
 SimpleCondition cond = new SimpleCondition();
 cond.setKey(HOOK_NAME);
 cond.setName("Is working day");
 cond.setDescription("Actions are executed if today is a working day");
 return cond; },
 consumes: { key -> return HOOK_NAME.equals(key); },
 execute: { key, expression, user, rjob ->
 Calendar c1 = Calendar.getInstance();
 c1.setTime(new Date());
 return ( c1.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) == Calendar.SATURDAY || 
          c1.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) == Calendar.SUNDAY ) ? false: true;
 },
 isBeforeActions: { -> return true; },
 isBeforeJob: { -> return true; },
] as ConditionProviderHook
 
GLOBALS.services.callbackRegistry.attachHook(HOOK_NAME, ConditionProviderHook.class, callback)

 

reportserver$ locate id:TableReport:123
Report Root/Dynamic Lists/myReport (Reportmanager)

The path resolver requires a Virtual File System path for locating the specific entity. Note that the path requires quotation marks if it contains spaces. E.g.:

reportserver$ locate "/reportmanager/Dynamic Lists/myReport"
Report Root/Dynamic Lists/myReport (Reportmanager)

You can also insert a relative path to the current location, e.g.:

reportserver$ locate myReport
Report Root/Dynamic Lists/myReport (Reportmanager)

Further, you can use an HQL query (Hibernate Query Language) for locating the needed entity or group of entities. Refer to https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/5.0/userguide/en-US/html/ch13.html for the HQL documentation. The syntax is: “hql:query” where the “query” is a valid select HQL query. Since HQL queries have blank spaces, quotation marks are needed. E.g.:

reportserver$ locate "hql:from TableReport where id=123"
Report Root/Dynamic Lists/myReport (Reportmanager)

You can also search for entity attributes, e.g.:

reportserver$ locate "hql:from TableReport where name like '%myReport%'"
Report Root/Dynamic Lists/myReport (Reportmanager)
Report Root/myReport2 (Reportmanager)

Try it out.

Performance

1. Tree node selection: We changed most of the dialogs to use a dynamic node loading tree, i.e. the new functionalty does not load all nodes at the beginning, as in ReportServer 3.0.5. They now only load only what you see. This is done in an analogous way as the main tree, where you can open a node and the node’s children are loaded on-the-fly. With this new behavior, all trees are now loading in less than one second. Until ReportServer 3.0.5, and with 100 000 nodes, these needed more than 2 hours to load. We changed many dialogs to use this new behavior: e.g. the group administration dialogs, the TeamSpace administration dialogs, and the scheduler administration dialogs. Further, all old tree dialogs were replaced with this new behavior. For example, when you can search for a datasource, or for a file, the trees are not completely loaded at start, but on-the-fly.
2. Search: since all trees in the node selection dialogs load on-the-fly, the search functionality becomes more and more important to perform well. We greatly improved performance by filtering only the needed number of results before the search is performed.

Please note that we have still some performance issues with large number of nodes, which we will handle in next ReportServer versions. Stay tuned for this. At the time – have fun trying!

Language support

<locales>en,fr,de</locales>