I have a few subscriptions now set up but notice that file name is always the same.
Could some sort of custom name be assigned such as Report Name followed by the date (I use reverse date format yyyymmdd)?
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I have had this request from one of our users too, generally though the email subject should be the report name, so it is fairly easy to monitor yourself but would be nice if the system does it.
Hi @ShaneAngel,
Oddly enough, I was going to be posting this feature request myself today based on user feedback.
I’m afraid an email description would not suffice for any business. We use subscriptions for Month End static reporting and this requires context of the file name.
One user for example will have 10 subscriptions per day over the course of 3 days (total of 30 Excel files), for the end user to manually adjust the filename to store as snapshot financial reports is not viable. i.e. 30 “Save As”, then renaming the file when the widget/favourite is the name they need is not useful. We are migrating people off SSRS reporting to be fully involved in Phocas, this is a minor element that I think all businesses would expect.
Can the file name not be the name of the Favourite/Widget Name, after all if you analyse the Widget the title of the screen has the widget name(also the email subject line)? So surely it should not be too hard to get Phocas to use that instead of the default text being placed on the file.
I consider this minor but things like this are significant for a end user as its something they have had in prior systems in the past and Phocas is a far superior product, but things like this impact user satisfaction.
Please can this be reconsidered?
Thanks,
Jon
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@JonKemp @ShaneAngel @StuartH Thanks for your suggestion. Your timing is perfect, as we are working on subscription improvements right now. We are changing the file name of the attachment to match the name of the favourite, as per your request.
At this stage we hadn’t planned on adding a date suffix though. Keen for your thoughts on this. Thanks.
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Hi @Tim.Leonard,
For me I would say the date/time of the subscription should be there, if the user doesn’t like it, they can shave that bit out when saving. May I suggest that we use ISO standards for the date YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm so this will work for all country locales please ?
Thanks,
Jon
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That sounds good to me, I only have UK to worry about but agree as a global product it needs to work for all.
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Sounds great, I think this will be a handy little feature, I have a few subscriptions but not enough for this to bother me, though I am sure some of our users will be excited for this addition.
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I think it would be very useful too as have multiple subscriptions all arriving at same time. If the subscription setup allowed you to define the first part of the file name and then date added as others have mentioned would be much easier.
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We’ve already changed the attachment file name to include the favourite name. That’s included in the next release (17th February).
I’ve included the generated date time on the attachment file name in the current subscriptions work we are doing.
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Hi @will.marriott & @Tim.Leonard ,
Fantastic! Great to see the file name on the subscription email. There was discussion in this thread about the time being part of the file name. Unless I did something wrong on the sub creation, its not there. Is this still being considered?
Thanks,
Jon
I think Will has said it’s in the development work they’re doing but they’d managed to push through the name part.
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Thanks for the feedback
Hi all,
As Will is having some well-deserved leave, I thought I would jump in here.
I can confirm that the date and time (in ISO format) will be included in subscription attachment filenames in our April release.
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