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Cycling your reports

You can generate multiple versions of a report broken down by dimension, such as year or region. Instead of one report, several reports are generated in a .zip file. If you have more than one cycle field, you will get as many reports as the combination of all cycle fields.

For example, you have a Qlik NPrinting Excel report called SalesData that you want to cycle by country and year. Your data covers 3 countries and 2 years, so you will get 6 reports in your .zip file:

  1. SalesData_Country1_Year1.xlsx
  2. SalesData_Country1_Year2.xlsx
  3. SalesData_Country2_Year1.xlsx
  4. SalesData_Country2_Year2.xlsx
  5. SalesData_Country3_Year1.xlsx
  6. SalesData_Country3_Year2.xlsx

Once created, the .zip file will be sent to every selected report destination, the same as a standard report. Report cycling works with all distribution methods.

If your reports contain conditions and filters, they will be evaluated in this order: Task filter > user filter > report filter > condition. Conditions are not evaluated separately for each report in the cycle

Limitations

 

Information note There is currently no limit to how many cycles you can select. However, you should choose a maximum of 3 cycles. You should not start a report cycle if your report dimensions contain many values. For example, if your data covers 10 years, 196 countries, and 50 products, report cycling will try to generate 98,000 files. This could take hours or days to generate.

Information noteSome SMTP providers impose size limits on email attachments. The maximum allowed size varies among providers. If the size of an attached file exceeds the limit, the email is not delivered. A warning is added in the logs.

Information noteDue to Windows file systems limitations, you cannot attach files with file names longer than 255 characters to Qlik NPrinting emails. If you attach a file with a name that is too long, recipients will see a message listing which reports failed to be generated. The following error message is added to the Qlik NPrinting logs: "Path with value name is exceeding windows limitations, the fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters."

Creating a new report cycle

Do the following:

  1. Click the Reports tab.
  2. Choose a report, and click the Enable cycle check box.
    3. Information noteOnce you choose Enable cycle, dynamic report naming becomes mandatory. The fields you choose to cycle through will be automatically included in the report name, but this can be customized under Dynamic name. See: Dynamic report names.
  3. Under Cycle, select a Connection and Field to cycle. We recommend choosing 3 or fewer Fields.
  4. Click Save.

The next time your report is distributed, it will be as a .zip file containing multiple files.

Troubleshooting

The folder containing my cycled reports shows reports with the FAILED label

Possible cause  

Your reports contain incompatibility filters.

Proposed action  

Check the filters associated with the report. For example, you have 2 filters:

  • The first contains → Year: 2012, 2013
  • The second contains → Year: 2014

If you use both filters, the intersection between the filters will produce an empty set.

My reports fail to generate

Possible cause  

Your report uses the same dimension in the task, user, report, and object filter hierarchy.

Proposed action  

Change or remove any filters that use the same dimension.

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