Generate Reports Automatically

This tutorial shows you how to generate reports automatically in the background with a cron job.

By default, iHRIS will launch automatically a background process to generate reports. However, this may be less than ideal on systems with higher load or a larger number of records. Instead, you may wish to schedule reports to be run at specific times. For example:

• The search report should be run hourly -- this way new people added to the system will show up in the search page
• Other reports should be run on a nightly basis

The first step is to determine the list of reports that you want to generate. You should also determine the frequency that you want them archive them on. In this example, based on iHRIS Botswana, we show you how to setup generation of hourly search reports and other reports nightly.

Turn Off Background Report Generation

See Configuring Report Generation Timing.

Getting the Report Name

You should first create a list of the reports that you want to generate For each of the report views that you want you can get the name/index of the report from the URL. The easiest way to do this is go to

• Configure System
• Reports

Now scroll over the "generate" link next to report that you are interested in with your mouse, and you should see a URL like:

 http://localhost/iHRIS/manage/CustomReports/generate/search_people

Then "search_people" is the name of the report.

Creating A Shell Script (Hourly)

In your site customizations, create a new top-level directory called "cron." For example if you site is at:

/var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite

you can do: <source lang='bash'> cd /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite mkdir -p cron </source>

Now we want to create a shell script that will archive our reports from the command line. To so: <source lang='bash'>

cd /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite/cron
gedit generate_reports_hourly.sh

</source> This will open up an editor. You want to add the following: <source lang='bash'>

1. !/bin/bash

reports="search_people" for report in $reports do

   echo Archiving with /usr/bin/php ../pages//index.php --page=/CustomReports/generate_force/$report --nocheck=1
   /usr/bin/php ../pages//index.php --page=/CustomReports/generate_force/$report --nocheck=1

done </source> then save and exit. What this does is run through the list of reports (contained in the variable report) and generate them each individually

See iHRIS Botswana for an example.

Creating A Shell Script (Nightly)

In your site customizations, create a new top-level directory called "cron." For example if you site is at:

/var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite

you can do: <source lang='bash'> cd /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite mkdir -p cron </source>

Now we want to create a shell script that will archive all reports from the command line. To do so: <source lang='bash'>

cd /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite/cron
gedit generate_reports_nighly.sh

</source> This will open up an editor. You want to add the following: <source lang='bash'>

1. !/bin/bash

do

   echo Archiving with /usr/bin/php ../pages//index.php --page=/CustomReports/generate_force/ --nocheck=1
   /usr/bin/php ../pages//index.php --page=/CustomReports/generate_force --nocheck=1

done </source> then save and exit. This time, since we are generating all the reports, we did not need to list out each of the individual reports as the command will automatically try to generate them all.

Committing to bzr (Optional)

Of course we should commit our new shell script to bzr: <source lang='bash'> cd /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite bzr add cron bzr commit -m "added shell script to handle generation of reports" </source>

Setting Up the Cron job

Now we need to tell our server to run the our new script, archive_reports.sh each month. To do so we do: <source lang='bash'> export VISUAL=gedit crontab -e </source> which will open up gedit. We want to add the following line to the end of the file: <source lang='bash'> 50 * * * * cd /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite/cron && bash generate_reports_hourly.sh 10 2 * * * cd /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite/cron && bash generate_reports_nightly.sh

</source> save and quit.

This says that we will run nightly report at 2:10 every morning. The hourly report will get run at ten minutes before every hour.

Note, if you also set up archiving of reports you will want to make sure that the nightly report generation has enough time to complete before starting the archiving.

Adding a New Report

Simply edit the file /var/lib/iHRIS/sites/mySite/cron/generate_reports_hourly.sh and add in the report to the list of reports in the reports variable.

Don't forget to do "bzr commit cron/generate_reports_hourly.sh -m 'added open position report'"