Summary

If you regularly e-mail reports to groups of people using Report Commander, you may want to create one or more mailing lists to use with Report Commander, rather than always specifying the complete list of recipients on the command line. The "response file" feature introduced in Report Commander 1.1 makes it easy to do this.

More Information

This article applies only to Report Commander 1.x. In Report Commander 2 or later, use e-mail distribution lists.

A response file is an XML file that is used to provide some or all of the command-line parameters for Report Commander. To create a mailing list for use with Report Commander, you will create a response file that contains the members of the list.

This example illustrates a mailing list that sends mail to 5 people: john@yourdomain, jack@yourdomain, susie@yourdomain, gina@yourdomain, grubby@yourdomain.

Creating the Response File

You can use a text editor such as Notepad or an XML editor to create the response file. Although the response file can be used for any of Report Commander's command line parameters, in this case it will include only the emrecipient parameters needed to specify the e-mail recipients. The response file should look like this:

<parameters>
 <emrecipient>john@yourdomain</emrecipient>
 <emrecipient>jack@yourdomain</emrecipient>
 <emrecipient>susie@yourdomain</emrecipient>
 <emrecipient>gina@yourdomain</emrecipient>
 <emrecipient>grubby@yourdomain</emrecipient>
</parameters>

You can repeat the emrecipient element as many times as necessary to include all of your recipients.

Now save the response file as "mylist.xml".

Using the Response File

The contents of the response file are inserted into the Report Commander command line using the "@" symbol followed by the file name, as shown in the following example:

"C:\program files\arcana development\report commander\adcrutil.exe" -report="C:\somereport.rpt" -exportformat=pdf -exportfile="report.pdf" -removefile -emserver=mailserver -emsender=me@mydomain -emsubject="test report" -emtext="here is your report!" @c:\mylist.xml -parameters 32 16 1983

The Response File can be included anywhere on the command line before the -parameters option. It causes Report Commander to behave exactly as if the parameters had been typed on the command line at the point where the "@" directive occurs.

Note that you can use several response files on the command line, which means you can maintain different mailing lists in different response files, and send to several mailing lists at once:

"C:\program files\arcana development\report commander\adcrutil.exe" -report="C:\somereport.rpt" -exportformat=pdf -exportfile="report.pdf" -removefile -emserver=mailserver -emsender=me@mydomain -emsubject="test report" -emtext="here is your report!" @c:\mailgroup1.xml @c:\mailgroup2.xml -parameters 32 16 1983