Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode, our host Bret Alarcon is joined by EDU Manager, Zach Malloch to discuss scheduling reports to run automatically. Zach outlines a few potential use cases for scheduling a report, using a dynamic date range when scheduling a report, and how to make adjustments to a scheduled report.
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:09
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. And I don't know where my camera is, apparently. So I gotta stop sharing. Oh my gosh. There we go. All right. Apparently not with it today. Anyway, with you today is Zach. And he's going to be talking about scheduling, scheduling reports and RecTrac. So we'll be talking about automating reports, editing the criteria and adjusting some schedules. So before we start, if you have any questions, just Click that little q&a Button at the bottom, you'll get your little question sheet, going to ask your questions, and we'll give you answers. We also have a little chat Button at the bottom. If you want to make any comments during the presentation, you're more than welcome to. So with that, I'm going to handle handed off to Zack before I start making more mistakes.How you doing Zach?
Zach Malloch 1:03
I'm doing pretty well. It's funny, because last week for the virtual symposium my god Bret's not here. I don't have the right files.
Bret Alarcon 1:12
Not not totally back from vacation, apparently.
Zach Malloch 1:14
Okay. Yeah, we are talking about some reports today. And I mean, kind of the core concept here is that every single report in RecTrac can be scheduled if you want it to. So if running reports is a part of anybody's job description, I don't know, reports are sometimes important things. You can potentially significantly simplify your life and you can have RecTrac automatically send the report to people. And we'll we'll go over some of the options and kind of best practices and settings and the like. So kind of couple of the most common ones would be a GL distribution report. So something like your Joe distribution summary that you want to send to finance once a week or whatever, we could certainly do that. I see there's a question already practice that.
Bret Alarcon 2:06
Yes, very important. Is that a Mandalorian? Behind you, or not? Madalorian, a mandolin! Okay, I'm gonna shut up now.
Zach Malloch 2:13
This is my ukulele. I have a mandolin. It's in the other room. But the ukulele stands on its own. Usually it stands on its man is today what's going on today, Bret? Music is less like crashes to the ground. But anyway, luckily, it's hopefully pretty sturdy. But we were talking about reports. So the GL distribution report is one of the most common ones that you have to send out fairly frequently or periodically to different customers or customers, to your staff, maybe to finance department or your managers or supervisors or whatever. And we can do this either as the cash journal or we can go into like the GL distribution dynamic. And then we can say that we want that to be a summary report. And whenever I hit process, I am presented with this Button. But maybe we haven't paid much attention to the schedule. But actually, before I get here, there's something even more important to talk about. And that is the way that dates work. So using something other than actual date is a very strongly recommended situation. So when you're running it for particular, like you want to run it for last week, you're probably coming in here, you're choosing an actual date, and you're just picking a day from the calendar. Now the problem is if I schedule this, if I hit process and hit schedule, it's going to use those dates every single time this report runs. So basically, you're just going to get a new copy of the exact same report every time it's scheduled to run because theoretically, things aren't going to change in those past dates very often. So what we recommend doing is using one of these other equivalent dates, I call them relative date fields, because it's related to whatever day it is that you're actually running it. So if I said, run it today, maybe I set this to run at 11:58pm. So today is always going to be the end of the current day. And then it'll email out once it's completed. But it always adjust and shift. So you know, today right now is March 3, tomorrow, we would consider today, March 4, and then on Saturday, we did consider today, March 5, so it's going to kind of move along with that. There are a couple of really useful and important tools that we can do with this.
Zach Malloch 4:36
So if I was to do something like this, well, that's today plus one. So that would be tomorrow, or if I did today minus one, that would be yesterday. So maybe I'm scheduling this for 12:05am we know 100% sure that everything has been done for the previous day. We're not going to miss anything that like if I had it running at 1158 if somebody did a transaction 1159 And that wouldn't be included. But if we're doing something like this, we can always run it just for yesterday, we can also come down and we can say at the beginning of the month, and if I do beginning of the month plus one, that'll be the beginning of next month, next beginning of last month to have a minus one, if we did two, it'd be two months ago. So we can kind of affect these relative date fields and make them work pretty well. If we did Sunday, that would be this Sunday, if we did a plus one, it'd be the Sunday after next, if we didn't minus one, it would be last Sunday. So a lot of flexibility in that. But we definitely don't want just coming back to it, we don't want an actual date here, because this will never change after the first time it runs. And you're probably not going to want it to do that. So I'll set this to something like today. And actually, I'll use that example. So do today minus one, it is important, you have to put in the number first, because negative zero doesn't mean anything won't let you like if this is just a zero, I can hit the negative Button as many times as I want to, I have to put the one in first and then hit that negative sign.
Zach Malloch 6:05
So I'm going to Click process. And you know, the whole process of running the report, configuring it runs, setting all of your criteria, which GL codes you want to include which pay codes you want to include which modules you want to include. Or if it's an activity roster, if it's a Facility Reservation schedule, all of that is exactly the same with a little asterix around the date fields. But then we just get to the schedule piece. And this opens up a different interface for us. So we do have to have a unique name for this. So I'll just call this GL distribution. If I can spell it distribute the huge rec chat so that I know which one we're looking at here. And then active or inactive, you're always going to be active when you're starting it because theoretically, you want this report to actually run that's why you're scheduling it, if it's inactive, it will not run. And then we can set our beginning date and ending date. So this has nothing to do with the dates that are included on the report. This is the these are the dates that the system will check to see if we should run this report and then do so. So if I wanted to start with today, then I can go out as far as I want to if I just want this to be every single day, you know, we can go past our hopeful retirement date here. And this is going to continuously run. So every whatever, you know, I can choose my month I can choose weekdays, I can choose my times and everything as we go through. And it's going to run this report based on this other criteria every time it's checked between those two dates.
Zach Malloch 7:38
So do I want it to run every day? Or is this something that doesn't matter? During the summer, maybe we turn off those, if it's some sort of school based report and we want to mirror the school year, maybe we can do that for sure. And it would just skip the dates that fall within a particular month. We can also tell it that we want it to run on particular weekdays, we can say we want it on maybe the first and the 15th of the month. So the first of the month and the 15th kind of get those kind of in between times. More commonly, I definitely set it up myself for weekdays. And then if it's something that you want every day, just turn everything on, or you can say only actual weekdays, not weekends. So lots of control over what you want to do there. And then as far as fixed time or time interval, we're usually doing fixed time for reports. So this is just going to say we want this to run at you know, I'll do this 12:05am Because I scheduled it to run for yesterday state. So at 1205, it'll run for the previous day. Ideally, you're not, you want to try to find times that are not the same as other events that you have set up. If you had eight different reports all set up to run exactly at 12:05am. It could potentially peg your server processor, impact to the processor, the the speed and the response, the performance of your server. And it could be a little bit of bad thing. So ideally, we're staggering. The scheduled reports out there really fast reports, it probably doesn't matter as much. But if you're running like you know an accrual history report for eight years, you want to be a little bit cautious about when, when you're stacking that what you're stacking that on top of and we'll look at how you can see what sort of events are there or not in a moment.
Zach Malloch 9:25
Then you have your run as so I'm logged into the system as the ZZZ you user, whatever user you're logged in, as we'll say run as and this is important because as it one runs the report, it'll check the permissions based on this user to see if you have access to everything that you're running the report for. Let's say you have an aquatics user, and they're running a GL distribution report for all aquatics revenue. Well, you'd probably want to run it as that user so that you're not including stuff from other areas. It's just going to focus on aquatics revenue if you only have permissions to aquatic stuff, And then we can have an email to address when the event completes. Now, this is just a notification that the event has run, this is not actually getting the report emailed to you. So if you did want to email it to somebody that would actually be on the previous Screen. So I'm going to go back just one second. And I'll just jump through this really quickly. So when you hit process, I can tell it how I want the report to come out. So you really only have preview an email report. And you notice we also have the FTP and SFTP options. I think I might have seen that that
Bret Alarcon 10:31
is a question about the yes. Is is it possible to send FTP to a to an FTP location?
Zach Malloch 10:39
Yep. So this is a little bit of a newer piece. I haven't personally tested this very much. But you know, you get your options. As far as how you're going to connect, it looks like this ties into a different area where we could potentially configure, I'm gonna guess URL port number, Username, password Type stuff. Interesting. So actually, maybe I'll put a little asterix on that. And I will say that that might be coming, we'll at least put a pin in that. Or Bret, maybe I don't know if you have the ability to. Interesting.
Bret Alarcon 11:17
Oh, yeah, you do have the options down there.
Zach Malloch 11:20
But when we're adding this or the, the system code, it seems like it thinks it's a different Type of system code. Let's Okay, so FTP looks like it's working SFTP looks like it is not working so far. So you just put in your SSH, your FTP site name, Username and password, and then it should be able to run it and automatically upload it for you. SFTP looks like looks like there's some problems with the system code. So we'll write that up. And I don't know if it's intended to be working yet. But since we can see it will at least hold development's feet to the flame a little bit for that. But if you're so you do have the FTP option. So you have basically these three options, you can't automatically print scheduled reports. So printing is tied into VIC logic. And these reports are technically running on the server and possibly when you're not logged into the workstation. And most of the time, we don't have printers installed on the server. So you're not going to be able to just say, well, I want to come in in the morning and grab the paper off the printer. But you can have it emailed to you. And that's a very useful thing. So any addresses, you want to separate with comma put as many of them as you want to, here's a report you requested. It's always tough to Type when people are looking. Enjoy. Alright, so now I continue. And I'm going to schedule and will, if you just preview the report, it's going to store the report in the database, we'll show you where you can get that from also. But if you email, it'll continue, or it'll actually email it for you anyway. And I didn't hit the Schedule Button, I hit Continue instead. So pretend I had set this up and hit the Schedule Button. Min, we get back into all of these fields.
Zach Malloch 13:03
So this is the GL RecChat, we'll just call it it's active. We want to have our date ranges. So I did see something about asking if there's a to explain the dates again, I think Amy asked that. Return that the these dates in here for scheduling or the dates from Okay, so if we're talking about this date range, it's basically like imagine your to do list on your calendar. It's Monday, you look at your to do list, what do I have to do today? That's what RecTrac RecTrac is doing. So it's every time the schedule is checked, it says it checks against the list and it says Is there anything I have to run right now. And so it's looking at a combination of the date, the month, the day of the week, and the individual time selected here. So if I had this set to, we'll just put this back a couple of days here, something like this. And then RecTrac runs its process and it sees if anything's ready to run for today. And it doesn't see it because this doesn't show up on the third. So this this report is effectively past, it's not going to run anymore, because we're beyond the ending date. If I extend this out into the future, something like that. Then every day that RecTrac checks to see if there's anything to do between March 1 and march 29th of 2063. It will see this report based on these other options. So like if I do Monday, Wednesday and Friday, it will check to see on let's say March 5 On Saturday, it's gonna see well, should I actually run anything it was? Well, first of all, march 5 is between those dates. So that's a check. It's included in the month that we have so that's a check weekdays Nope. It's not Saturday, if I turned on Saturday, then it would see that there's also this to run on a Saturday. And if it is that if But when it checks at 1205, so the scheduler in the background is checking every 55 seconds so that we're guaranteed to run at least once per minute, it will then run the report, if this date was prior, or if this date range is outside of the the actual day that RecTrac RecTrac is running to check the schedule, it won't run because it will be outside of the scope. There'll be an incompatibility basically, with the way it's been set up and scheduled. So then we had all this other stuff, I found another couple of questions coming in here.
Bret Alarcon 15:31
Yeah, Pamela wants to know, if you can do a specific example, she needs to run a report every Thursday for one week, how do I schedule for one week,
Zach Malloch 15:40
every Thursday, so report range would, okay, so that's going to be your criteria stuff. So then what I would probably do is, I would set up something like this, I would say Thursday. And I'd want to go to last Thursday, through I mean, if I'm setting this up to actually schedule it, to run on a particular day. So it'd be last Thursday through today. And then when I schedule it, I would just go in, and I would turn on Thursday as the only day of the week to check between whatever ranges that we have here. So we'll do something like that. So all of the date ranges between these, it's going to check to see if it's time to run for every single month. But it will only find it to actually run when it is a Thursday that it checks on and then it will go back to last Thursday. So I mean, that's one way to do it. We could also just say, you know, once again, understanding that we're scheduling it for a particular time, we could today, today minus seven, so whatever the day of the week is minus one week, so Thursday minus seven is last Thursday, and then it will include that range. And once again, I would do the same thing, where I would tell it that I want to schedule it, and have it run only on Thursdays.
Bret Alarcon 17:03
So Amy's wondering why you put today for the end date.
Zach Malloch 17:07
Well, that's because whenever this actually runs. So let's say that this is going to be next week, so it's going to be March 10. So it's going to check to see what's going to run and then it's going to pull the report criteria that we just set up. And so on March 10, today means March 10. The previous the begin date is March 10, minus seven. So it's gonna be March 3 through March 10. So today always adjust to the day that the report itself is actually running when that schedule event is actually checked in RAM. So that makes sense.
Bret Alarcon 17:48
I'll see. And then Pamela says, I need future week Thursday to Thursday.
Zach Malloch 17:53
Interesting, is um, so I'm guessing this isn't a financial report for Pamela is most likely like a roster or facility schedule something along those lines. You can certainly do that. In which case, you would say maybe this would be today, and then you do today, plus seven. So once again, if we're saying that this is going to run on March 10, march 10, is when it's going to check to see if there's a report, it's going to say okay, this report needs to be run. So today at that point is going to be March 10. And then today plus seven is going to be March 17. So that would be your future Thursday at that point. So hopefully that. Awesome. You're very welcome. I see the response.
Zach Malloch 18:40
All right. I see that a couple other questions in the actual q&a area,
Bret Alarcon 18:45
yes. Does it pull email addresses from a list when you're going to send out an email option?
Zach Malloch 18:52
So it does not, you do have to manually Type things in here. Now as I say that, there might be the option for the activity rosters to email it to staff as well, I'm trying to remember if that's we can go into those in a moment. But it is you're just going to have to copy and paste your email addresses for this part of it for the most part.
Bret Alarcon 19:19
And the other question, if you send it to an FTP server, does the file have an unique name? Or does it override the file that's already there?
Zach Malloch 19:27
Very good question. And that might actually ended up having more to do with the way the FTP site is configured. That being said, I believe that we add our time and date tag to our reports. I might not have any recent reports here that I've actually run but I believe Yeah, the names will be unique, so you're not going to really run into it. So the first part of your question is accurate, Gary that the five Allah has a unique name, so you don't have to worry about the overriding piece. Alright, and I saw there was another question about like, maybe the dates the whole, like adding a seven removing seven kind of comes back into play here. So it's really today is a little bit it is a little bit confusing to talk about because you know, today is today but if I am presuming that I am time traveling and speaking to you from when the date is March 10. Well, then Today is March 10. So it's always in relation to that. And it's do you want to add a number of days to march 10? Or do you want to subtract the number of days from March 10. And then also understanding that if we time travel again, if we go to march 20, we're going to do the same amount of plus or minus to march 20. So today is just always saying whatever the current date is, is what I'm going to put in there. It's like an algebraic equation where you say x equals current date. So if I have an equation, X plus seven equals the value that I want the month rep to want to run the report for, then x is replaced by whatever the date of the actual date you're running this is, and then you're adding seven, or you're removing seven or 12, or 14, or whatever to it, or from it. So and you can certainly run that like this is just about the criteria. So this has nothing to do with actually the scheduling piece of it. So you can certainly run it. Like if you're running a Facility, Reservation, or report any use like the plus and the minus days, when you actually get the results out. It'll show you the dates that the reservations are included on. And then you can get into the the other components there. Hopefully that helps out. Or you have something else coming in.
Bret Alarcon 21:49
Yeah, Debby wants to know, can you please start from the beginning to show how to set up an FTP report. So I can see all the steps?
Zach Malloch 21:55
Yeah, so this will actually be the first time I'm doing it also. But it looks like we can do it by turning on this FTP report option, then we get this other control, then in this point, I would create a custom code that has the information about the FTP site that I'm trying to connect to. So we'll just call this vs. FTP. And you know, technically RecTrac Are we have switched over to SFTP. So this won't actually work for us. So don't do it, and then anticipate that it would, but I would do something like this. Put in the actual URL to the FTP site right there. VSI. FTP is what we normally have. And I don't actually know what the password is right now. But it's like, usually something related to the season. So I'll do snow. Dolla Sign, it's it's blocked out anyway. But you just need to make sure that your Username and password are accurate for this site, and then that saves the system code. And then we select this system code. Once it actually saves, I would have thought this would be pretty quick.
Bret Alarcon 23:09
I wonder if it's checking your Username and password at the moment?
Zach Malloch 23:12
Yeah, I wonder that would be I would be surprised if it was but I suppose things are? Oh, yeah, it did. We service focus we are. So it won't actually let us save something that doesn't actively work. So the reason I can't hit this right now is because we're using SFTP. This is an FTP thing. And it doesn't look like our FTP SFTP codes are working right now. But as long as this is valid, and the Username and password is valid, it should confirm that as you're clicking save. And then you would have that option, we're going to have to use our imagination right here a little bit, we'd have that imagine that picture that item from the list, I would Click on it, I would hit Select. And then it would fill in that information. And then so you can put in your subdirectory. And actually, it's looking like it's asking for a file name. Oh yeah, if we leave it blank, it's going to use the RecTrac report name. So that would be that uniquely named pieces Gary was asking about. So you don't have to worry about overwriting anything, if you did want it to overwrite, then you could manually Type in a name here and then theoretically that would always overwrite for you. And if I just look at the directory Yeah, if it's blank, it'll just put it right at the root of the FTP site. But like for ours, we have the pub folder and then we have our files updates and drivers folder so I put in my FTP connection and then I would put in pub here it doesn't need a forward slash or backslash
Zach Malloch 24:51
Yeah, so you don't actually it doesn't seem like you need to put the forward slash or back slash into that. Alright, and so you would have your connection already. configured and tested by creating that system code, then you select the system code here, you put in your directory name if you need to, otherwise, we'll just go to the root. And you can specify a name if you want to. Otherwise, we'll just use the report. And then you go through the same scheduling process like we were just doing there. Okay. And they see another one about modifying Yeah, so that's actually going to be the next topic we get to. So very, very good questions about how to configure some of these pieces. But let's go ahead and leave this like this, I'll actually schedule it so that I can get into something that I'm editing. Because each time I've kind of stopped from that final point, so I can go back and explain something else. So we have all of our date ranges here, once again, I'll make this into the future. And I'll just turn on all of my days of the week, so that it's going to definitely run each day. And I'll make it for 12:05am. And so this would just be once again, this is the notification this is this, this report ran, it doesn't include the report in that email, it's on the previous Screen where you would put the email addresses where you want to actually attach the report and send to. So it hit save there. And now it says it's been successfully scheduled. Well, what if I want to look at that and verify it because I don't trust things? Well, I would go to scheduled events management. And then if I look down for GL, there's my GL RecChat, there's the one I just created, you see, it hasn't actually run yet. And that's because it's not going to run until, if I look at my if I Click Change event, I can double check to see what the schedule is. And I can edit the schedule here. So this is just the schedule, the frequency that it runs, is it running at 1205? Or is it running at 5pm, I'm changing that I'm not changing any of the criteria of the report here. But you can edit and verify and validate right there. If however, I go to more, well, actually, before I Click this is the secret update event settings. But on the right hand side, this is basically the report criteria screens just done without any Screen design. It's just all the list of all of the different fields. And of course, if you want to, you can validate things just by looking at all of this stuff, but it's not the easiest thing to look at. So if we go to more, and we go to update event settings, then this brings us back to the report Screen as it's configured for this particular scheduled report. And then we can make some adjustments to it. If we want to change our GL range. If you want to change that date range. Like if I if I did want to say it minus one for the begin date there. Then I make that. And then when I hit process, it's not going to ask me about oh, it is asking me about the output. So just hit schedule. It does have all the same stuff. When I hit save it is now updating that scheduled event. So now this has those new components. If I go down to the Date Field, you should be able to see though, the minus one for the beginning date. Somewhere. Yep, there it is. So it updated to be today minus one. All right.
Bret Alarcon 28:14
Kim has a question. If a report has been created, can you go to the scheduled reports and update the email address from the unique report name due to change of employees?
Zach Malloch 28:26
So I don't actually think I saw the ability to change the email address. Let's double check. Well, yeah,
Bret Alarcon 28:34
I think you I think, yeah,
Zach Malloch 28:36
that was just not focused on that piece. But yeah. Gary is confirming I trust, Gary. But yeah, so we're in the update, you hit process, and then it gives you all this information. So yes, you can then change that then hit schedule, then you're once again confirming that this is still the schedule you want, and then hit save, and then it will save it with that updated email address to send the report to once you're done. So go Bret.
Bret Alarcon 29:05
Michelle also had a question. Does the history stay in the scheduled events or once it runs, its schedule isn't removed?
Zach Malloch 29:14
Well, we actually can see it in real time right here. So I have this test. This is actually an export, but it is the date range was only from 503 2021 to 630 2021. So it hasn't run since 630 21. But it is definitely still here. So if you wanted to kind of reactivate it, you can certainly change the event, just update the dates and times the date range that you're running it for. And then you're good to go. Good question though. And I do want to address that we're out. We're already at 230 here. So I appreciate everybody's attention. We'll go ahead and stick around for a little bit longer. If anybody has questions. It is very, very useful and powerful tool, it can be a little bit confusing to start with. But once you play around with it a little bit, I think it gets pretty easy to use. And I always like to ask Brett, if there's anything that I missed that he'd like to point out or suggest,
Bret Alarcon 30:16
not the, I can really think the only thing I could really think of is if you're fresh from 10.3, I know 10.3 did not have the ability to redo a report, you could fix the schedule and tell it to run different times, but you could not go and fix the criteria of the report. So if you're coming from 10, three, like you're fresh from 10 Three, just know now that you can go back in and just anything on the report, rather than just the schedule.
Zach Malloch 30:42
And actually see Joyce is asking something very much related to that. So not everything is going to have this update event settings Most reports should. But like this, this is the process of automatically renewing your past memberships that might have expired. And we don't really have that ability. If you don't have this update event settings, then basically the recommendation is or the the way to do it, there's not really a way not to do it like this is just to delete the event, then go in and actually run the event itself, again, with your new configuration and then reschedule it. Every report though, as far as I'm aware, so anything that says routines report should have the ability of updating the event settings there. There's also a couple of things just like while we're talking about scheduled events in general. Like when we add a miscellaneous event, this is a list of only a few very specific things. And there's not really configuration, there's not really settings for them. So it's just the reported schedule, or this process is scheduled or it's not scheduled. And you won't be able to update those either. But when you're in the scheduled events, management, once again, if you see report, in this in the scheduled program Field, you should always be able to get to that update event settings. What else?
Bret Alarcon 32:06
Another question from Betsy, if you want to run report starting today and into the future, do you just need to change that today setting?
Zach Malloch 32:16
So I might need some clarification on the question. But I think what we're doing is we're kind of getting a little bit confused by when the report runs. Is is all on this Screen. It's just when do you want to get the report? When you want to configure the report based on like what transactions do I want to include? What reservations do I want to include what activities do I want to include? That's all on this Screen. And that's kind of the magic of like, if I just leave it to this, like let's just say I want my my daily summary of all of my GL distribution reports, I would just leave it like this. And I could schedule it from now until nine the year 990,000. The furthest year we can possibly get to. And it will always run based on whatever the current date that it's checking to see if we should run that report is. So you'll get a report, including the transactions from every single day, individually. So
Bret Alarcon 33:18
Darla is just kind of repeating what you said, we set it to run from today to a date like 2024, and then update when we need to put in the date out further.
Zach Malloch 33:29
Yeah, and that's not a bad way to do it. Like you know, I talked about those extensive future dates. And that's nice because you set it and then you never have to worry about it again. But sometimes if you don't worry about it again, then you keep having things that you don't actually need. And they just keep running. So if you if you have a standard, like we're never going to schedule anything more than two years in advance, kind of like what Darla is setting, then if you don't manually say that we need this to go longer than it'll eventually drop off. And, of course, the more scheduled events you have, the more frequently it's going to check. And the more of a you know, the more of a list you're going to have, the more likelihood you might have things kind of stacking up on top of each other, the more possibility there would be that you could impact your server because you know, each of these is a task. It's a process. And the way that RecTrac runs those reports is it it takes one of your server cores and dedicates it to running this report until it's done. So you have eight cores on your server. If you're running eight reports at the same time, you potentially having all eight of your processors tied up in your server is going to be at max capacity and performance everywhere else is going to decrease a bit. So it's great for that option to automate the process. But if you can certainly kind of bury yourself in it potentially.
Bret Alarcon 34:47
Darla also wants to add, you might want to mention that when you do the updates and your server processes are stopped these reports won't run overnight if the server processes are down.
Zach Malloch 34:58
Yeah, that's a really good point. So actually So you can see like, I've got a report queued. Well, this is an email queue. But sometimes we'll get things queued up. These are dependent on your servers event timer actively running and going through that process. So if the if the app server timer isn't running, I'm sure if you know, if you've been using RecTrac, for a really long time, you've probably noticed, you try to just run a report manually. And then it says, connection to server hasn't been established for more than they'll give you some sort of 1000s of numbers of minutes. That indicates that your app server or timer is not running on the server. And as Darla mentions, if you are if you're doing maintenance on your server that takes down those processes, then the reports won't run while the scheduler is not being checked. So it is something to be aware of if you if you know that there's an issue or if you're dependent on certain reports. And if you don't get it on a particular time, then maybe you come in here and you double check and see if things are queued or if they're active or inactive. If they're queued. All you have to do is double Click on it. It'll default to active and then when you hit save, it will save it as an active record. So if you did have anything that ran into that cute event, you can very easily update it and get it back to Active status there. What else do we have coming in Bret?
Bret Alarcon 36:25
Burt was wondering, can we clone scheduled reports and then tweak and update the report itself? Or the schedule?
Zach Malloch 36:32
Unfortunately, no. Now, what can we do? Yeah, unfortunately, no. I was going to talk like go down the route of like report templates where you can kind of save the settings, right here like so I can have this configured in like five different ways and then retrieve those various components just by running and picking from my report templates here. But you'd have to, you know, apply those criteria, then schedule it, apply whatever other criteria you want, then schedule it, apply whatever criteria you want, and then schedule it. Now you could certainly go into a report and you can update the event settings. And then that will at least show you how the report is configured, take a screenshot of each Screen or whatever. And then you know, you can configure the report again, to be the exact same way and then do whatever tweaks you need to for that. But there's not a way to schedule it as a new event when you're doing the updating piece. So there's there's not that clone function for the for the scheduled events unfortunately. It I see there might be one or two other question that comes into into chat. Bret, I see something there about it.
Bret Alarcon 37:54
Yeah. Yes. So I mean, so I need to have a monthly facility calendar for the begin date I entered. For one, end date 1231. For day options, I choose specific days of the month and choose the first of the month. Does that sound right?
Zach Malloch 38:14
For scheduling the for the schedule? Yes, that sounds right. If we're talking about these dates here, then you could just do beginning of the month to the ending of the month. And then when it checks on April 1, it will say well, the beginning of April is April 1, the ending of April is April 30. And that will be what's included on the report. So yes, with that little asterix, and as long as you're just talking about the schedule itself.
Bret Alarcon 38:43
Teresa wants to know, what's the login info for the support portal, you should actually have your own personal login information. If you don't have that you can call in or email into support. There's also a Forgot Your Password. Yeah Button down there that you could do into your email, or your Username, which is typically your email and it should be able to retrieve it for you. If it does not, we might need to make sure that you're set up within an account properly.
Zach Malloch 39:13
Yeah, it would just be a real quick call to or case with support to do that. And if you then are in here and you choose the drop down, you get RecChat, you know, I have editing capabilities, you won't. But if anybody wants to edit our page for us, just let me know. But then you have all of our previous RecChats all the way back to 2019. Remember, 2019 was an hour of your time.
Bret Alarcon 39:40
All right, Zach looks like it. Yeah. Marine wants to know if you could take us out with a mini sorry, ukulele mini concert.
Zach Malloch 39:48
Oh, I don't know if I had a concert the first time to pick it up from under my desk but
Zach Malloch 40:02
See what would be a good little thing to say I don't really use it for songs I just kind of walk around with it and make different sounds coming from it like
Bret Alarcon 40:14
what was your part for the RecTrac? Intro?
Zach Malloch 40:24
Pretty impressive. It's better with guitar and bass and vocals on top of it. Yeah, there's, oh, I could do like
Zach Malloch 40:38
you made a lot of pop songs you take on me or if anybody hasn't ever watched axis of awesome, their four chord song shows like all the pop songs that use the exact same four chords and takes it through in a really pretty fun way to do so. But yeah, thanks for putting me on the spot Marine.
Bret Alarcon 40:56
Amy had a quick one pop up. How do you cancel a scheduled report?
Zach Malloch 41:00
How do you cancel a scheduled report? Well, I mean, that's not about something outside of the topic of this conversation at all. canceling all you have to do hit process because we're in this update. So this will bring me back to my scheduled events. Once I finish this, you just delete it, basically. I mean, you could if you want to leave it here, because you might want to reactivate it. You can change it and just make it inactive. Like that. Or you could change your date. So it's any date past like earlier than today, because it's never going to check back for previous dates. Or you can delete the report. All of that works pretty well.
Bret Alarcon 41:43
Karen wants to know, can you do fret tapping on the Uke
Zach Malloch 41:47
technically I'm not going to try it at this exact moment. Yeah, maybe next time. Yeah. Really, really great questions. And I want to thank everybody for participating. And Bret and Julia for serving up the questions for me to answer or at least attempt to answer for everybody. And yeah, enjoy scheduling and automating the report and I won't tell your supervisors that you know how to do this if you don't tell them so. Enjoy, and I will talk to you all later.
Bret Alarcon 42:21
Thanks, everyone.
Zach Malloch 42:22
See you later. Bye.