While I genuinely believe VisualCron is a self documenting, my manager insists that I create and keep up to date a report for all of the VisualCron jobs running on all of our servers. I tried to do something with the XML export settings that VisualCron has but I really didn't get anywhere with that. If the XML could be made into HTML with hyperlinks to the jobs and their descriptions, that would really help (like SandCastle does with .NET documentation).

Its possible that someone has already done this but I haven't been able to find it easily.

VisualCron is a great product. Kudos!

-Dave

Thank you for your comments.

The question is, what is a report really? What should it contain and what should it look like? The problem is finding a solution that fits everyone.

What works currently, is that you can create an email and you can use whatever Variables you like to customize your report. It is not a one click solution but you can have it just the way you like it.

Perhaps the solution is some templates? If we created some templates where you chosed the columns to use?

Another question that we are having is what the format should be. Should it be made for printing? Do we want the report in a specific format?

We welcome all comments to this topic.

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We would also like to have reports.

When it comes to using email for the reporting, the problem with that is we have lots of jobs, and we're planning to set up lots and lots more. The preferred report would include information on all jobs on a particular server, and without formatting into something such as a spreadsheet, it wouldn't be easy to work with. And even using variables, I'm not sure how the report would work if I want to select all jobs on the server - that seems like I would have go through and set up each job and task for the report, wouldn't it? If so, that would be quite extensive, and if it has to be done manually, there would always be the danger that something has been overlooked - it's not static, we're frequently adding new jobs.

Aside from that issue, what might be useful would be to send the information, in place of an email, to a file that could be exported into another format, such as a spreadsheet, or something else that might work well with being able to examine what is configured.

What would be really nice, is to be able to set up different kinds of queries to base a report on. For example, sometimes we encounter a problem with a particular job configuration, and we want to find all of the jobs on the server with the same configuration so that we can make the same change to it. Right now, we have to look at every job that might be the same, rather than being able to quickly identify the jobs that are the same. Even nicer, would be able to do the query, then from the query list, be able to make the change either to each job individually, where necessary, or to all at once, where practicable.

Thanks for your quick response Henrik. In my case I'm just looking for something simple. Export into Excel or CSV with the following fields would be fine my me:

Status (Active / Inactive)
Job Name
Job Description
Trigger Description
Time Exceptions Name (Checked Items Only)
Conditions (Checked Items Only)

That's it for me but I realize others will have different needs and will want something more robust.

The idea above about being able to write your own queries against the jobs is interesting. That would probably work for me and its certainly robust. I could take the results of my query and format it anyway I wanted.

Cheers;

-Dave

Please test the report in 5.1.4. It currently only have Jobs and Tasks but any comments would be useful.

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Thanks for your quick response Henrik. In my case I'm just looking for something simple. Export into Excel or CSV with the following fields would be fine my me:

Status (Active / Inactive)
Job Name
Job Description
Trigger Description
Time Exceptions Name (Checked Items Only)
Conditions (Checked Items Only)

That's it for me but I realize others will have different needs and will want something more robust.

The idea above about being able to write your own queries against the jobs is interesting. That would probably work for me and its certainly robust. I could take the results of my query and format it anyway I wanted.

Cheers;

-Dave

Dave - were you ever able to generate a report like this? we are looking to get some sort of report that tells us which jobs have a certain time exception checked as we need to decided if the time is correct still due to business hours changing. I am not finding a quick and easy way other than going through each job (which we have at least a hundred) and seeing if the exception is checked.

Thanks