Reports - Scheduled Reports


StarRez allows users to schedule saved reports to run and be printed or emailed at a specific time. This is helpful if, for example, you want to send a list of all maintenance jobs submitted from the previous day to your facilities supervisor or you want to send a roster of students scheduled to check-in that week to their Residence Don.

To learn more about scheduling reports, check out this StarCare Online article.

 

Notes and Best Practices

Reports with variables or parameters

You can not schedule a report if they contain Variables or Parameters. To do so you must save your variable with a static value first.

Use one schedule to send to multiple recipients

If you want to schedule sending a report to multiple recipients, enter multiple addresses separated by a semicolon. Multiple schedules of the same report sent to multiple addresses during the same timeslot may result the scheduled report to fail executing (i.e. the scheduled report will fail to send).

Recommended best practice

System will run one report and send it as one emailed report sent to multiple addresses.

Screenshot of report scheduler

Not recommended

System attempts to run the report multiple times at the same time. May cause the report schedule to fail to execute.

image of report scheduler

Avoid scheduling reports at the same time

It is best practice and StarRez recommends that we spread scheduled reports out (over time) so it’s easier to manage, troubleshoot, and to make sure they don’t interfere with each other. Reports scheduled to run simultaneously may interfere with each other and may fail to execute (i.e. the scheduled report will fail to send).

At this time we have almost 400 scheduled reports in our StarRez database. Many reports are already scheduled to run simultaneously. 

A​​​​​​​CTION REQUIRED

If you have reports scheduled to send during the timeslots indicated above, please review and reschedule your reports per the instructions below to optimize sending.

 

When is the best time to schedule a report?


StarRez recommends only 4-5 scheduled reports to be emailed at a single time or, if feasible, in increments of 5 minutes just to be safe.

For example, if a report has already been scheduled to send at 10:00 am, you may want to consider scheduling your report to send at 10:05 am instead. We created a global report that users can use to find an optimal time to send their report.

 

  1. Run the Count of Scheduled Reports by Time of Day report. While logged in to StarRez,
  2. Using the report, identify the time of day on which you want to schedule your report to send.
  3. If at least three (3) reports are already scheduled to send on your chosen time of day, consider scheduling your report 5 minutes before or after the used timeslots
    • For example, if 3 reports are already scheduled each for 13:00 and 13:05, you should consider scheduling your report at 12:55 or 13:10, if those slots are still available.
  4. If your operations require it, you can schedule reports to send in one minute intervals.
    • In the example above, if you really need to send a report shortly after 13:00 but it cannot be as late as 13:10, you can consider scheduling it at 13:02, 13:03, etc.

Did my scheduled report execute successfully?

Successful scheduled reports will appear in the report’s activity log under Reports > Saved Reports > [Find your Report] > Manage > Activity Log.

Users can also create a report to check whether their scheduled report executed successfully or not using the Report or Report Schedule main table. To view results for your reports only, filter for your reports by ReportID or ParentID (folder ID). If you need assistance building these reports, please contact starrez.help@utoronto.ca or contact StarCare.

Report schedule timing

The StarRez Scheduled Service which processes scheduled reports will check for new schedules at the top of every hour so if you were to create a new schedule at 7:10 AM that sends a report daily at 7:30 AM, the scheduled report would not send until the next day at 7:30 AM, as the new schedule would not be processed until 8:00 AM that same day (on the hour). If the report is scheduled to run daily or weekly but has already run that day and you schedule it to run again later in the day it will not run again until the next day/week.  In order for it to run again that day a new schedule would need to be created.

If you have other questions or concerns about scheduled reports, please contact our team via email or by submitting an ESC ticket.