Sending Email report on periodic basis

[aalkins]

Is there an automated way to email a report on a periodic basis, i.e. automatically send the report every Monday at 3:00PM?

[Ted Giles]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

Try contacting mattdonlan on this Forum.
He sent me details of a regular update e-mail process but it went to my old PC and is now history.
You will need to set up a timer on a Form which needs to be open. While the Form is open, if the timer matches the day and time, the mail will be triggered.
There will be better answers I'm sure, but yes it is easily possible.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

Ted has the right answer but I don't think you can say send the email at 3 pm. You can say send it between 3 and 4.

The timer needs to fire every 3600 seconds. That will mean any script attached to the ontimer event fires once sometime during each hour.

There have been suggestions in other threads about creating a separate database to send the email. Onactivate event of the startup form if I rememeber, and opening that database at the appropriate time with windows scripting/scheduler.

[Ted Giles]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

Just another thought.
It's possible to test and see if the report is available - that is with a standard naming convention - and fire it off when it's ready.
Not tried this personally, but I'll have a fiddle later today.

Stan, how much resource would be used if the script was along these lines?

Script
If day() = "Monday"
For i=1 to 86400
If now() = Report launch time
Launch report
Next i
endif
endif

Please excuse basic - I'm in the middle of hoovering the house.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

I think you're expecting each loop in the for..next to take one second, which it won't.

You need something like sleep(.9999999) inside the for loop.
You need to change day() to day(date()).
You need time("0h",now()) = "03" instead of now()

Resource wise I think it would completely tie up the open instance of Alpha on Mondays.

[Ted Giles]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

I realised it was rubbish when I got to the bottom of the stairs!

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

Nothing is rubbish if you give it an honest try. At the very least we learn something from our mistakes.

Note my boo-boo in this recent thread.

[Tom Henkel]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

I built an application that would produce and e-mail reports to over 100 subscribers 4 times a day, unattended. The alpha portion was pretty straightforward in that we created an "autoexec" script to build PDF files of each required report and then, based on a client table, looped through an e-mail send routine, attaching the report to the e-mail. To fire it off, we used the windows "Scheduled tasks" to start Alpha running the proper database. It worked like a champ!

Tom

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

Thanks, Tom. That's what I was trying to say with

opening that database at the appropriate time with windows scripting/scheduler.

but you explained it much better.

[Tom Henkel]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

always glad to help. (and thankful that I can...)

[DaveM]

Re: Sending Email report on periodic basis

always: it is best to stay within alpha? well, kinda. to build on Tom Henkle's usage:

On a timer event in windows(scheduler), you could open another adb in the same folder as the app each day at 3:00pm and automatically send the email or do whatever and the the adb would close when done.

Wrote an app in alpha for a previous employer that ran on first start of computer and deleted certain programs that employees may or may not have on their computers(games, etc) and closed. If the computer was not shut down, it was set to go off at 3:00am. Worked very well since almost all the computers were down every night. It also kept a log of files deleted. We later set it so it also copied all the information of where the user of the computer went on the internet(all of it is kept in user).