Change Reports directory for report_engine

[Anon Anon]

I was looking for a way to cleanup old reports from the report engine since the folder is very large.  In doing that I ran across this thread http://forum.nimsoft.com/t5/General/Reports-Cleanup/m-p/286/highlight/true#M194  what I am wondering is:

 

Can I change the reports directory on the report engine and just move the reports to that location?  If I do that will the reports still be available through SDP?

 

What are other users doing for report cleanup?  

[Anon Anon]

I believe most people of written some type of script for cleanup which is what I have done just looking at the timestamp of any files and removing old ones.  You can move the reports and then they will show up in sdp as long as sdp knows the new locations.  If you remove a bunch of reports the main html file may not have all the new info and I think it runs nightly.

[Anon Anon]

Ok so how do I let sdp know where the new location is?  currently in the report_engine the report directory is listed as "reports"  if I change it to "\\Fileserver\Reports" and put all of the reports that I have today in that folder will sdp access them properly?  

 

the way I understand it if I delete files older than some date just by timestamp the dates will still show up when looking at the reports but won't have any data.  Are you saying that if I delete them like that without doing anything some job will run at night and fix the html pointers to remove the dates for files that no longer exist?

 

 

[Anon Anon]

In my experience (from several years ago), my script had to delete the corresponding line in menu.html when I deleted the HTML and PNG files for a report. I am not sure if that has ever changed, but I never saw anything to indicate it would behave differently now.

 

If you want to test it on a small scale, you can manually delete the HTML and PNG files for a single report. Then check back in after "a while" and see if the report menu still shows that date as an option. If it does, you can manually clean up that specific one by editing menu.html and removing that entry.

 

-Keith

[Anon Anon]

I guess though really my question isn't so much about the clean up as moving the files.  I want to move the files where I won't have to clean them up.  if I change the directory in the report_engine setup all new files will go in the share but can I move the current data to the share and they will all work?

[Anon Anon]

That will definitely work for the report_engine, but I am not sure how the SDP will respond. I do not know how the SDP locates the reports from the report_engine, but hopefully it asks the report_engine how to find them.

 

If you relocate the reports, I would recommend stopping the report_engine while the files are copying to the new location. Then update the config and start the report_engine. If you update the config and let the report_engine use the new location before you copy over the existing report files, you could end up with duplicate files like menu.html that would potentially need to be merged. I have experienced this before, and it is a hassle.

 

-Keith

[Anon Anon]

Keith,

 

Thanks,  I am going to try it out and see.  Great advice about the duplicate files.  

[Anon Anon]

Hi there Casey.

Did you have success on this procedure moving the files?

[Anon Anon]

Leonardo,

 

Yes moving the files was a success.  There were a couple of issues caused by the move however.  the first was that since I had a very busy report engine by the time the 10GB of files had completed copying the report engine was backed up and ran at 100% for several hours catching up.  The second was more of a nuisance caused by windows.  I would see an error in the alarm console that the mapped network drive was disconected from the robot of the report engine.  I just hid the alarm since it was really just a problem with the way windows handles SMB sharing.