Have you looked into scheduling reports in Web Report Studio?
Two scenarios that make this option valuable to SAS Business Intelligence Users:
1. Performance Improvement via Report Caching
If the data is only updated weekly (for instance) but the report is viewed multiple times in the week, scheduling the report can offer some performance improvements.
Just change the existing report from Type = "Data is Automatically Refreshed" to Type = "Data can be manually refreshed" in the 'Save As' screen. This allows users to view a static/cached version of the report updated during the last scheduled run, rather than running the report on the fly.
Important Note: It also makes sense to include the dynamic field text 'Date the data was last refreshed' into the report header or footer. This provides information to the user on when the report was last scheduled.
2. Archiving reports for auditing or review purposes
If historical output is needed, simply set up the archival option by selecting the checkbox on the scheduling screen: "Retain previous instances of output not to exceed" and enter the number of historical files to store. Important note: SAS currently names these files automatically with the date, therefore only one report can be saved per day.
References
- What's New in WRS 4.2: http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/sgf2008/webreport42.pdf
- Online Documentation on Scheduling Reports: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/citug/61084/HTML/default/n1a9hii7mw99afn1qcp4xtb4x10m.htm
