Saving Tess files w RAMP

Re-posting in case someone out there has answers!!

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Hi all,

We are on RAMP and the various paths to save files from Tess are arduous. Is there a way for users to indicate a default location for files to be saved? Currently it's a very nested path of folders that is compounded by slow response.

Thanks,
Megan

Hi Megan,

We are also a RAMP site and have the same problem. I've noticed that once a report has been saved to a particular location on our internal network, future runs of the same report will default to the same location. Which makes life a little bit easier, but not for first time runs.

I don't think there is any way around this as the RAMP server initially sees its own network and only sees your network once it's been taught that it exists. The slowness is probably due to the data coming over your external connection. We've recently had our external connection upgraded and saving reports is better - not perfect, but better.

Hopefully someone else will offer more useful comments!

Debbie

We have had similar experiences, so I have a tip I have found useful and have shared with our staff, who seem to use it when they need to. 

I have a folder on our main network drive (not the local RAMP network, but OUR network drive) and it's a folder I've named .RampFiles (notice the '.' at the beginning, which will then sort that folder to be the first to appear when you go to save a file from Tess after you access your network drive).  It helps because then you don't have to sort through a thousand folders through the RAMP connection and cuts down on the wait time. 

After you save to the folder, you can go back in through your network and save it again to where it needs to actually go and delete the original file if you need to. 

It's tedious at first, but I"m so used to it by now, I'm able to save quickly with no problems.  :)  I hope this helps. :)

Tiffany, on first attempt it seems to already be a big help. Thank you!!

Debbie, I tried to post a response to you but I think I failed. But here it is-

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Thanks for your message. I want to clarify - after you've saved a report on your network, future saves default to the same location, even days later?

That is not the case on our system. Sometimes I have that within a session of being logged in, and sometimes the memory is wiped even within one session. Same story with importing lists, though the time window there is much shorter.

Megan Hall
Seattle Symphony

Hi Megan,

You are correct. Once you have logged out and logged back in again the default save folder goes back to the RAMP server. I guess, like everyone else, I've just got so used to going through the folder select process, it has become invisible to me.

Debbie

Had this conversation with a user again yesterday.  It really is a nuisance, and I don't particularly like the idea that we'd need to add new folders to any local machine that might run Tessitura.  I think I'd rather have the option for each user to have access to their own RAMP desktop (or a subfolder of it) via FileSaver/FileMover.  I'm going to ask RAMP about that, but it seems like such an obvious idea that there must be some reason they haven't done it.

There used to be a Desktop access option (because I had access to it) via 2X back when RAMP was connecting that way, but it went away when Citrix came around.  I would not mind seeing that come back again.

I am not sure what the solution is, but there definitely should be a simpler way of doing this.  I am not sure how related this is to it, but to me it seems like it might be.  We have found that our users are regularly asked by their Windows application to "permit access" to the Tessitura (and related) applications every time they log on, even after clicking "remember my choice" when that option is present.

John A. Moskal II said:

There used to be a Desktop access option (because I had access to it) via 2X back when RAMP was connecting that way, but it went away when Citrix came around.  I would not mind seeing that come back again.

Yeah, that went away with 2x, which sucked because I did a lot with that.

However, that Desktop (the Windows desktop of your RAMP account) is exactly where your file save dialog box begins.  And (just checked) you can drill down from there to the IMPFTP folder where Extraction files are dumped.  That part is only slightly less annoying than trying to find your own desktop on our local machine, but if an link on everyone's RAMP Desktop to that folder would be a help.  However, for security I'd definitely prefer that each user see an individual location in their FileSaver.

I have to believe that Version 15's Windows integration for logins HAS to make something like this a lot easier, or at the least, make making that enhancement to Tessitura a lot more programmable than it is now.  It seems counter-intuitive that they would be able to integrate login credentials and not able to do something as basic as identify a default save location.

Then again, it has been a while since I did direct application programming as I have mostly stuck to database and website work over the last 5+ years.

Maybe.  Counter-intuitively when we moved to Windows Auth for SSMS I lost the ability to do BCP on RAMP because of an inability to match file system permissions that had been available to SQL Server authenticated accounts.

Did you lose the ability to run them, or could you run them but it would just not save correctly?  Because with the upgrade to Version 14, you no longer have full sysadmin rights (assuming you had them in the past).  You still have a fair bit, but they are no longer giving full on sysadmin rights anymore.

It's ultimately a file access thing, and it's much old than the v14 upgrade, it started when they started offering Windows Auth for SSMS (and the Security Tool).  For a while the let me keep a SQL Server Authenticated account, but after the v14 upgrade they took that away from me.  We've spent a year trying different things, but RAMP has been completely unable to configure an account for me that does Windows Auth and has file access.

I'm working on a project now to change my BCP utility into a SQL Server Agent job.  That way I can give it to them, they can give it to SA, and then (as a SQL Auth account) it will have the permissions it needs to run BCP.

To be specific: I run BCP to import NCOA data into impresario for our custom NCOA process.

We also have a custom NCOA process, but I just wrote a pretty simple process to follow for it.  I have always just used the fun and pretty basic "Import/Export Wizard" to bring the stuff to a local table that I create every time with the data coming back from the NCOA people in the form of an Excel file (though when I am trying to locate the Excel file on our shared drive, I do get to go through the fun search and find process through all the folders to locate the document that was the start of this whole thread in the first place).

Once that data is loaded though, I have three different, quick procedures I run to verify the validity of the return data, compatibility with customer accounts in the database (excising any changes between the time the data was sent to NCOA and then returned) and then finally to update the data to the customer records.  I then drop that local table so that it can be created again next time through the utility and referenced by the procedures again without having to change anything.

It does not take that long at all and has worked pretty well for us.  We also only do NCOA like every two or three months.