I've been recently asked to alter a canned report for Development. They want the Print Acknowledgement Letters report to include an extra field that will specify which text their Word template will generate when they print their letters each day; a simple concept, yes.
However, I am not an Infomaker expert - or fan, for that matter - and am generally leery of mucking around with Tessitura's canned reports if it's not necessary. So, my standard answer is to make use of the highly preferable Visual Studio and put most reports on our Reporting Services site.
My concern with this strategy is by not using the canned report, am I missing out on some sort of internal process (i.e. a stored procedure) that needs to run in the background to make certain important updates, to whatever myriad tables in Tessitura may be involved, in the running of the original report that won't be done using Reporting Services?
Also, are we maybe overthinking this? Is there perhaps a better way to accomplish this task - perhaps even one that Tessitura already designed but is not being implemented at the moment - wherein for whatever different kind of contribution we receive, we can have different verbiage automatically chosen for the printing of the letters? Or is a well-designed Word merge letter template the best way?
Or do I need to start taking some Infomaker and Tessitura Reporting classes pronto?
Thank you in advance, Tessiturians.
Matt Gonzales
I am not a whiz-bang programmer, but I have created a local procedure copy of the procedure behind acknowledgments, adding a couple of extra fields (both program-name-related); I then added these fields to the end of the data columns in the InfoMaker report, saving it as a custom, user-defined report as part of my custom library; then went into t_defaults and added my custom InfoMaker report to the acknowledgments that needed the extra fields. Given that we merge from the acknowledgment report into Word, I didn’t worry too much about how the InfoMaker report displays when run in Tessitura.
I haven’t changed the standard report, just copied it to something new, so that if anything I did breaks down the line, I still have the standard report to use; or if, during an upgrade, the standard report is written over, my copy is unaffected.
Lucie
Hi Matt,
There is definitely built in functionality for sending different acknowledgments based on the type of contribution. Check out the Contribution Acknowledgments document for details, specifically the section on acknowledgment rules. You can either create different InfoMaker forms with different wording for the different types of contributions, or use the same form but enter it into T_FORMAT_INFO multiple times with different descriptions that you use to key the different Word merges for the final acknowledgement letters.
Kevin Sheehan
Senior Documentation & Learning Resources Specialist
Tessitura Network
+1 888 643 5778 x 329
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com
As Lucie described, it is possible to both run the standard report and your own code, i.e. create a custom sproc, run AP_ACKNOWLEDGEMENT_LETTERS within it, sending the output to a temporary table, and then sending whatever you want of that data + additional data to a custom InfoMaker report.
We have a number of custom acks, both for Devo and for ticketing orders, that work this way, and are very happy with the results. The same basic idea works very well for custom renewal notices, too, running TP_GET_REN_NOTICES within a custom spoc in that case.
Matt,
We have made a lot of customizations to BAM's Acknowledgment process with the help of Cindy Emig in consulting services. (Thanks Cindy!)
In our process we did what Luci has said to add data elements, that the standard Print Acknowledgment report just does not have. Note: that the standard Print Acknowledgment report does write data back to the database. So you want to use the standard procedure and wrap your processes around it as Lucie has described.
We also do what Kevin has said to differentiate the letters one from another.
As you are talking about differentiating your letters. I would suggest that you start with the more standard approach suggested by Kevin. And then only if you can not produce the acknowledgment that you need without adding custom data go down the path that Luci has suggested. There is significant cost in both time an money in making these lower level customizations.
You might also want to talk with Consulting Services. They may be able to help, and keep you from having to become an Informaker guru just to make acknowledgment work.
--Tom
Thank you to everyone who replied. I think for me the biggest problem with using InfoMaker 10.5 is that I see so many wildly varying results on different machines and it's totally confusing. For instance, I made a copy of the acknowledgement letter canned report in Tessitura TEST and opened it up in InfoMaker. I would like to adjust the query to add in a new field that my adjusted stored procedure will be outputting, but when I go to click on the Data Source button, it's grayed out. Since it's a copy, I shouldn't have to rebuild the query, right? Is it grayed out because there's no query or for some other reason? This is just one of the many weird things that InfoMaker does on a regular basis.
I appreciate your thoughts.
As discussed above, leave the standard report alone, and create a new IM report that is fed by a custom sproc that runs AP_ACKNOWLEDGEMENT_LETTERS within itself, sending its output to a temporary table that you further modify from there. No need to modify or copy the standard report, or the standard sproc.
I can send you some code offline that illustrates this if you want. It's a very liberating technique...
Hi Chris,
I'm resurrecting an old thread here, but hoping you might share this code with me? We have a couple orgs in our consortium who would be beyond thrilled if I could easily get custom acknowledgement letters going for them. I understand the method you're describing here and in another post, but sometimes seeing it in code is a huge help to visual folks like me!
With gratitude,
Stacey
Sure, I'll reach out offline.