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
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.