Controlling Scheduling with a SQL Query

From XLCubed v7.1, you can use a SQL query to populate the recipients of a scheduled report, and the parameters used when preparing the report itself.

Preparing the SQL Statement

The SQL statement should return one row per report configuration, and columns configured like this:

Email	Role	Locale	Parameter1	...	ParameterN
recipient1@example.org	Role1	en-US	Value1		ValueN
recipient2@example.org	Role2	fr-FR	Value1		ValueN
recipient3@example.org	Role3	fr-FR	Value1		ValueN

Email 

The email address for the recipient of the scheduled report. From v9.1, this can be a semicolon-delimited list, which then share the rest of the parameters, for example recipient1@example.org;recipient2@example.org

Role 

The Analysis Services role to use when preparing the report

Locale 

The culture to use when preparing the report

Parameters 

Any Web Parameters to use to populate the report. See below for more information

Configuring the Distribution List to use the SQL Query

File-based Repositories

• On the web server, open the distributionLists.xml configuration file, found in the __xlcubed__\__scheduling__ subfolder of the XLCubed Repository
• To each dynamically populated distribution list add:
  1. a dbConnection element, containing the connection string to use to connect to the database. This can include the User Id and Password connection properties if appropriate, but not a Provider property
  2. a populateQuery element, containing the SQL statement to run
• Your distributionLists.xml file should now contain an element that looks like this:

<distributionlist guid="xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx" name="List name">
  <dbConnection>Data Source=serverName\instance;Initial Catalog=DBName;User Id=Username;Password=ThePassword</dbConnection>
  <populateQuery>ap_GetSchedulingItems</populateQuery>
</distributionlist>

SQL-based Repositories

Available from v9.0

• In the SQL repository update the XL3DistributionLists table:
  1. update the cDatabaseConnection field to contain the connection string to use to connect to the database. This can include the User Id and Password connection properties if appropriate, but not a Provider property
  2. update the cPopulateQuery field to contain the SQL statement to run

Populating Web Parameters

The columns returned by the SQL statement above can be used as dynamic parameter placeholders. For example, if we return a column named AccountName, we can now use the parameter placeholder %AccountName% when configuring the report to use. Note that SQL columns used as placeholders must be string types, i.e. char, varchar, text, or their Unicode equivalents.

For more information about parameter placeholders, see the Scheduling page.

See Also

• Scheduling with the File-based Repository
• Scheduling with the SQL Repository
• Web Parameters