Massive reporting: export looping through entity items

Alessio Biondi

A common challenge using Board is to export from Board to other media formats (like pdf, xlsx, pptx, ...) especially when the output must be "one file per each item of an entity". Call it a loop through entity items or "massive reporting".

 

When setting print options in the Board screen it's possible to use "paged by entity" option but the outcome is not as needed: if you export to excel you'll have the same file overwritten by each item paged. If you export to pdf you'll obtain a unique pdf with many pages. Many situations need huge amount of files, without need of complexity of Office Add-ins, VBA procedures and so on.

 

In earlier Board versions there was a useful feature in dynasheets: de facto you could have the output file with a mask name like FILENAME_%entity%.xls

 

Could this be again possible in Board future versions?

 

There's a useful feature when exporting txt files: you can use environmental variables in export path and filename (see http://help.board.com/Chapter_8_-_Process_Modelling_files/Actions_reference/Xtract.htm  for details).

 

In this link it's also mentioned the capability to use substitution formulas in filenames, e.g. file_@user.txt

 

Could it be possible to add this feature to the reporting export action (manual action and procedure command) and use with @Entity?

 

Setting in the print options a path like [drive]:\path\filename_@Entity.pdf and "paged by entity" the outcome would be great!

 

Thanks

Product Management Team

Thank you for sharing your idea, Alessio. We appreciate the time and effort you put into crafting your suggestion. Great news, this feature is available through the Broadcasting actions as explained here:
https://www.boardmanual.com/2021/summer/data-modeling/2_Database_design_functions/8_Procedures/The_Procedure_Designer/procedure-actions/broadcasting-actions.htm?rhsearch=broadcast&rhhlterm=broadcasting%20broadcast

Alessio Biondi

Sounds great!

Thanks for following up!