Schedule Management

You can schedule IBM® Cognos® entries to run at a time that is convenient for you. For example, you may want to run reports or agents during off hours when demands on the system are low. Or you may want to run them at a regular weekly or monthly interval.

To use this functionality, you must have the required permissions for the Scheduling secured function in IBM Cognos Administration.

To schedule reports to run in the delimited text (CSV), PDF, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (XLS), or XML output formats, you require the generate output capability for the specific format. For more information, see Report formats. You can update an existing schedule that specifies formats that you are restricted from running, but you cannot introduce to the schedule, formats that you are restricted from running.

In IBM Cognos Administration, you can control access to scheduling by day, week, month, year, and trigger using the appropriate scheduling capability. You can also restrict intraday scheduling using the Schedule by minute and Schedule by hour capabilities Secured Functions and Features.

If you have administrator privileges, you can also schedule tasks that:

maintain your content store Content store maintenance tasks
schedule query service caching tasks Creating and scheduling query service administration tasks
import or export entries from a deployment archive Deployment
run jobs Use Jobs to Schedule Multiple Entries
run metrics maintenance System Performance Metrics

You can schedule entries to run at specified intervals. You can schedule entries individually or use jobs to schedule multiple entries at once. Jobs have their own schedules independent from report schedules.

You can schedule entries to run on the last day of each month. You can also schedule entries to be triggered by occurrences, such as database refreshes or emails.

You can run reports to produce outputs based on the options that you define, such as format, language, and accessibility.

Only one schedule can be associated with each entry. If you require multiple schedules for a report or agent entry, you can create report views Create a Report View or agent views Create an Agent View and then create a schedule for each view.

After you create a schedule, the entry or job runs at the time and date specified. You can then view the scheduled entries and manage them. For more information, see Activities Management.

Credentials for Scheduled Entries

When you open a scheduled entry, the credentials show the current schedule owner. If you are not already the schedule owner, you can name yourself the owner Example - Change the Credentials for a Schedule.

Credentials for a schedule do not change automatically when you modify a schedule. You must explicitly change the credentials.

For information on data source credentials, see Trusted credentials.

Prompts in Scheduled Entries

If an entry that contains prompts is scheduled, you must save the prompt values or specify default values Specify the Default Prompt Values for a Report to ensure that values exist when the report runs according to the schedule.

In a job, you can specify prompt values for job steps. When an entry runs as part of a job, the prompt values saved in the job definition are used instead of the values saved with the entry. If no values are specified in the job definition, IBM Cognos software uses the values saved in the entry.

Priority for Scheduled Entries

When you schedule an entry, you may be able to select a run priority from 1 to 5. For example, an entry with priority 1 runs before an entry with priority 5. If there is more than one entry with a specific priority, the one that arrived in the queue first runs first. The default is 3. If you do not have permissions for entry priorities, the priority appears but you can not change it.

When you schedule a job, you can set priority for the whole job only, not for individual entries within a job. However, you can change the priority of individual entries when they are pending in the queue.

The priority of entries in the queue does not affect an entry that is already running. The running entry completes and then the queue priority is checked for the next entry to run.

For more information, see Manage Entry Run Priority.

Run Histories for Scheduled Entries

IBM Cognos software keeps history information each time a scheduled entry runs. You can use the run history for an entry to see the times at which it ran and whether the it ran successfully. For more information, see View the Run History for Entries.