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Placeholders in the CMC – Business Objects(II)

This is the second part of “Placeholders in the CMC – Business Objects”, please see the first part here

10. Placeholder List

Table Placeholder Variables

 Name Variable

Description

Title %SI_NAME% Report title, it is same as report rpt name
 ID %SI_ID% InfoStore SI_ID value, System ID
 Owner %SI_OWNER% Report owner who schedules the report
 DateTime %SI_STARTTIME% Date and time report was run, YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS
 User Full Name %SI_USERFULLNAME% Report owner full name, set in the properties page in Users and Groups setting
 Email Address %SI_EMAIL_ADDRESS% Report owner E-mail address, set in the properties page in Users and Groups setting
 Document Name %SI_DOCUMENT_NAME% Report document name
 File Extension %EXT% File extension, set in the Format step – Format Options
 Viewer Hyperlink %SI_VIEWER_URL% URL to view report, check more belo

11. For “Viewer Hyperlink”, we can set it from Applications -> CMC -> Processing Settings

12. So, for Notification setting, we can configure it like below:

13. To keep the placeholder setting, we’d better set it in “Default Settings”. The Schedule steps will copy the default settings, and we can customize them if necessary.

Conclusion

In this post, I illustrate the schedule placeholder variables in details. These variables help us manage report scheduling easier and with less effort, especially when we schedule report to a file system, and we configure email notification for success or failure.

There are several know issues regarding placeholders, they are:

  1. The format of %SI_STARTTIME% is not configurable. It is fixed as “YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS”. In the BOB forum, I see a lot people ask to set it differently. Another case is some people would like to remove time element, such as YYYYMMDD. From some discussion I know there is a hidden placeholder named %SI_STARTDATE% can help. But I didn’t get it work for the report schedule page, and some others reported the same problem. It turns out it works for publisher and need some further validation.
  2. %SI_DOCUMENT_NAME% cannot be evaluated during the report scheduling, either. It is displayed plain as %SI_DOCUMENT_NAME% in the export file name.

Thoughts on “Placeholders in the CMC – Business Objects(II)”

  1. Hi,
    Thanks for detailing me all and it really help now as per my requirement, Can I add a dynamic variable from database as placeholder into the email Subject line. like count of the records in reports.
    Thanks,
    Nirmal Kumar

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