External (Directory) Reports
External reports are available for Job objects only. They are a bit different. They are stored on the agents and not in the Automation Engine database and require some configuration.
In the case of Job objects, additional job output is stored on the agents. When defining them you can specify whether these reports should be saved to the database or remain on the agent. No matter where you decide to store them, with just a few configuration steps you can always access them.
You will find the following information in this topic:
- Registering External Files
- Transferring External Files
- Where you Find them
- Downloading External Reports
From an Automation Engine perspective, these files are external reports, so the first step is to register them as such. This way, you make the Automation Engine aware of their existence.
You do this Job object Output Page, where you must enter the path and name of the output files. Of course, you can also register them using the :REGISTER_OUTPUTFILE script element.
In the case of PeopleSoft jobs, you must configure the job to transfer the reports to the Automation Engine; you do so activating the Register Output Files option in the job definition. See Transferring PeopleSoft Output Files to the Automation Engine.
Once registered, these files are available and accessible from the User Interface. To display them, they are transferred via File Transfer objects. This behavior has the following implications:
- The file size is decisive for the time if takes to transfer the files. This is why large files are split in smaller chunks and displayed in pages you can scroll through.
- User can only open the files if they have the necessary authorization to access both the job and the external reports for the particular file and for the agent.
- The registered output files are retrieved by the agent; therefore, they must be accessible to the agent. If the agent cannot find the files, or if they cannot be accessed, an error is thrown.
You can now open the external Job output files as any other report from the Reports window by simply selecting Directory from the dropdown list:
The basic information on the report is available at a glance on the Directory table, namely:
- The name of the report as indicated on the Job object Output page
- The type of report
- Whether it is saved on the agent or in the Automation Engine database, according to the settings on defined on the object-specific page.
- Whether entering login information is required to be able to download the report. This depends on the job object configuration on the Attributes Pages of Executable Objects.
External (Directory) reports are those that are generated on and saved to the agent. From the Reports window you can download them.
To download a report to your machine, select it and do one of the following:
- Click the download icon
- Right-click on the report and select Partial Download
It might be necessary to enter login information. This depends on the job object configuration on the Attributes Pages of Executable Objects.
The download starts immediately. In case of reports that exceed 10MB, before downloading them the systems prompts you to confirm whether you want to download the whole report, or only a user-defined number of lines, either the first or last ones.
See also: