Scheduled Report Comes out Blank... sometimes

[Droid101]

So, I have a very simple report, which shoots out an email with the report in excel format attached, each morning at 5AM.

This report is just a list of open incidents assigned to specific groups. There are always at least 50-100 records in this report, always.

Every once in a while (say, twice a week), this report shoots out blank. When I go into the scheduled report a couple of hours later and hit "Execute now" it comes out and has the correct info in it.

Why would this happen?

[Aaron40]

Whoever caught that problem, it was a good catch! I don't believe that field is shown by default but if it's running as someone who is inactive, doesn't exist, or doesn't have rights to the table data the report is pulling from, the report will be empty.

For situations like this I've seen many companies create a local account that doesn't expire or quit.. or get fired. That way they don't need to keep up to date with the person you're running reports as.

[chadcrawford]

Aaron, great minds, etc. I was just getting ready to go down that path with my IT Security group. They typically frown on the use of "unnamed" accounts, so we'll see how it goes.

[Aaron40]

Does that mean you're using a person's account under Data Sources for retrieving update sets from your other environments? I once worked at a company where there was a very specific user account that update sets were retrieved from and it HAD to be their account. One day this person was out sick and there were update sets that had to be pushed to production but their credentials stopped working. I couldn't get the update sets moved to prod on time because they didn't us to change who the update sets would process under.

This is another one of those situations where it'd be nice to use a service account 🙂

[chadcrawford]

Yep, you're exactly right. That's the second time I've encountered a situation where a generic account would have been helpful.

From what I remember though, I was again able to replace that persons credentials with my own. In that case it was a consultant who had rolled off the project.

[Mark Stanger]

You can also just leave the 'Run as' field blank and the scheduled job executes just fine as a system user. I usually remove the default value on the field and then just let them populate blank unless someone specifically enters their name there.