Managing events overview

Event-based scheduling provides you with additional control over scheduling reports: you can set up events so that reports are processed only after a specified event occurs. Working with events consists of two steps: creating an event and scheduling a report with events. That is, once you create an event, you can select it as a dependency when you schedule a report. The scheduled job is then processed only when the event occurs. This section shows how to create events in the Events management area of the Crystal Management Console (CMC).

You can create three kinds of events:

• File events

  When you define a file-based event, you specify a filename that the Event Server should monitor for a particular file. When the file appears, the Event Server triggers the event. For instance, you might want to make some reports dependent upon the regular file output of other programs or scripts.

  For details, see File-based events.

• Schedule events

  When you define a schedule-based event, you select a report whose existing recurrence schedule will serve as the trigger for your event. In this way, schedule-based events allow you to set up contingencies or conditions between scheduled reports. For instance, you might want certain large reports to run sequentially, or you might want a particular sales summary report to run only when a detailed sales report is run successfully.

  For details, see Schedule-based events.

• Custom events

  When you create a custom event, you create a shortcut for triggering an event manually. Basically, your custom event occurs only when you or another administrator clicks the corresponding "Trigger this event" button in the CMC.

  For details, see Custom events.

When working with events, keep in mind that an object's recurrence schedule still determines how frequently the report runs. For instance, a daily report that is dependent upon a file-based event will run, at most, once a day (so long as the file that you specify appears every day). In addition, the event must occur within the time frame established when you actually schedule the event-based report.

Note:    For information on scheduling an event-based report in the Objects management area of the CMC, see Scheduling a report with events.