[ipac] RPA Reports

[Brad Bates]

This is off-topic for HIP, but I don't think there is an RPA mail list.

Also, would someone pass this along to the Horizon mail list when you can.

We were as disappointed with most of the RPA reports from the EasyAsk
application as we are with Horizon Ad Hoc reports, so I created some new
tables in the RPA database and a couple of stored procedures that allow me
to build monthly reports using an ODBC connection from within Excel that
gets me:

  The name of the resources accessed
  The date and time of access
  The IP address of the system that accessed the resource
  The name of the library that IP address is in, if it is in a library

The default sort from the procedure is by resource name and date/time, but
since the data is all dumped into Excel it is easy enough to manipulate it
so that you can see everything sorted by the library names for internal
resource access, or whatever.

This seemed to be what our librarians wanted to know, and so I figure some
of you who use RPA may find this useful.  If nothing else it may give you
ideas on how to make other reports or procedures that you can use on your
system (and that others may want to know about).

Also, please note that since it is using ODBC for the Excel part, you can
use OpenOffice for this as well or, for those of you who use Sybase, you can
use ISQL or SQL Advantage to hook into your RPA server's database and just
run things from that once you setup your RPA server connection using DSEDIT
(our RPA server uses port 2638, which is standard for the ASA stuff, and CP
1252 for you ODBC users).  I guess you could generate some scripts to dump
the reports out and just email them to your director(s) if you want to get
fancy.  Nothing beats sending out a report just before lunch on the first
Monday of the month to let everyone know how hard you are working that
morning.  Yawn...

I have not typed all the parts up yet, but would be happy to send it out to
anyone who wants a copy when it is done.  I have to do the documentation
anyway, so just drop me a note if you want it.

Brad Bates
IT Manager
Polk County Library Cooperative