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  • Post last modified:October 30, 2020
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You are currently viewing Run BI Publisher Report from Custom Payroll Flow Pattern
Run BI Publisher Report from Custom Payroll Flow Pattern

In this article we will look into executing the BI Publisher Reports from Payroll Flow.

If there is a payroll flow which serves some purpose like Payroll Calculation/ Inbound Interface/ HDL Transformation load etc. And if you want to run a BI Report post the flow completion then you can use this approach to add the BI Report to the Payroll Flow using the “Run BI Publisher Report” task and get it executed as part of the flow.

In some cases, client doesn’t want the end users to access the Reports from BI Catalog, so all they do is to create payroll flows for the BI Reports the end users are interested in and secure them using the payroll flow security profiles. For each report there will be a payroll flow created or if there aren’t any input parameters for the BI Reports, then the report path and Name can be passed dynamically to the Payroll Flow to get the BI Report executed.

Advantages of running BI Report from Payroll Flows:

  • Security can be handled using Payroll Flow Security Profiles
  • The report can be added to the existing flow instead of manually triggering them post the flow is complete.
  • BI Report can use the parameters set by the prior tasks when run using payroll flow.

Let’s get into details of how to create the payroll flow and how to pass the parameters from payroll flow to BI Report dynamically.

Navigate to My Client Groups > Payroll > Payroll Flow Patterns and click on + icon to create a new Payroll Flow

Select the relevant LDG under which you want to create the Payroll Flow Pattern and click continue

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Provide some unique name to the Payroll Flow

Select the Activities to Include as “Statutory”

From Tasks scroll to “Run BI Publisher Report” and move to selected tasks and click Next, Next and Next to get to the Parameters screen.

If the BI Publisher Report has input parameters, then you can add parameters with Lookup/Table Based Valueset/Text input.

Click Next, Bind the flow parameters to task parameters and then click Next

Finally Click Submit.

Now, open up the payroll flow again and click edit and go to task parameters to set the report path and name it should refer to.

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By Default the LDG will be bind to the LDG Context.

We need to set the Report Name and Report Path with the BI Report path from BI Catalog. Report Path is the mandatory field.

Report Name: It will be just the Report Name without any extension. Ex: Assignment_Salary_Info_Rpt

Report Path: It will be the complete report path from Custom folder along with the .xdo extension. Ex: /Custom/Human Capital Management/Assignment Salary/Assignment_Salary_Info_Rpt.xdo

Currently this report doesn’t have any input parameters, so I haven’t added any bind values for First Argument, Second Argument, so on.

If there are input parameters for BI Report, then they need to be assigned to the arguments in the order of sequence in which they are visible on the Parameters tab of BI Report.

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Once you set this, the flow is ready to be executed. Once you run it, the BI Report would be scheduled in backend and get executed. The output will be visible on the View Flows page in the results. Alternative way is to go to Report history and get the output.

By Default the Output will have a wierd naming convention.

We will have to use a dummy bursting query to get a proper and meaningful output name.

Once you implement the bursting query, the output file name will be according to the naming convention setup on the bursting query.

Sample Setup of Task Parameters:

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If there are a set of BI Reports without any input parameters, then we can create a generic flow with “Run BI Publisher Report” task and have an input parameter for Report Path with text input and bind the task parameter to the flow. So when we run the Payroll Flow pattern, we will be prompted with Report Path and we need to input the complete Report Path of the BI Report to execute it.