Cycling reports

With cycles, you can generate multiple versions of a report broken down by dimension, such as year or region. Cycles are added when configuring a report task.

Cycles work by filtering the data included in each version of the report. The difference between a cycle and a report filter is that by adding a cycle, a single execution of the report task can generate more than one unique report for a single recipient. When you add a cycle to a report task, a unique report is generated for each unique value in the dimension you select as the cycle. If you have more than one cycle field, you will get as many reports as the combination of all cycle fields.

Cycles interact with the other types of filtering which can be applied during report generation. The order of evaluation is as follows:

1. Section access, if present

2. Task-level report filter, if present

3. Recipient-level report filter, if present

4. Cycles, if present

Example

For example, you have a report task to send sales reports. The report task is configured with the following settings:

• File name: SalesData

• Cycle on fields Country and Year

• Timestamp format: yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm

Your data covers three countries and two years, so six reports are generated and sent:

• SalesData_ Country1 _ Year1 _2024-11-08_10-30.xlsx

• SalesData_ Country1 _ Year2 _2024-11-08_10-30.xlsx

• SalesData_ Country2 _ Year1 _2024-11-08_10-30.xlsx

• SalesData_ Country2 _ Year2 _11-08_10-30.xlsx

• SalesData_ Country3 _ Year1 _11-08_10-30.xlsx

• SalesData_ Country3 _ Year2 _11-08_10-30.xlsx

Once created, the output files are sent to their destination as they normally would. Report filters and section access filtering are still applied as they usually would be.

Adding cycles to your report task

For more information about creating a report task, see Creating a report task.

Do the following:

1. Create a report task and begin the configuration process as you usually would.

2. After completing the Template section of the dialog, you arrive at Output.

3. Under Cycle, use the drop down menu to select up to three dimensions from the app.

Output file names

When you add a cycle, the name of the dimension value applied in the cycle is included in report file names. If a dimension value applied in the cycle contains any special characters, they are replaced with an underscore character (_) in the file name.

Special characters include:

• \ / < > : " ' ? *

• ASCII control characters

Handling errors

If an error occurs for one or more reports in a cycle, an empty file is generated for each failed report. The name of each of these files has a "FAILED_" prefix and reflects the combination of values that ended in error.

Best practices and limitations

Best practices

You should not start a report cycle to your report task if your report dimensions contain many values or unique value combinations. For example, if your data covers 10 years, 196 countries, and 50 products, report cycling could potentially generate up to 98,000 files (see guardrail below for current unique task constraint). This could take hours or days to generate, and could consume a large volume of report generation for your Qlik Cloud subscription.

Limitations

• You can select a maximum of three fields to cycle for a report task.

• When one or more cycles are applied, a report task can generate a maximum of 500 unique reports. When no cycles are applied, the report task can generate a maximum of 100 unique reports.

• The maximum execution time for a report task with a cycle applied is four hours.

For other limitations that apply to in-app reporting, see Limits and limitations for in-app report configuration.