10 Minute Tip - Scheduled reports sending multiple emails

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This BLOG was edited on July 8, 2018. There have been some excellent comments and suggestions that I wanted to highlight in the body of the BLOG.  Refer to the Comments section for any additional information.

Today we will discuss a couple of reasons why your users may be receiving multiple emails for a single scheduled report from Maximo. For example, the user has a weekly report sent to them yet, for some unknown reason, they get 2, or more copies of the report in their inbox. The "unknown" reason is usually one of two things.

• It's actually not a duplicate. Since scheduled reports do not indicate anywhere in the email where they came from - which Maximo server - we have seen times when the second email is actually not coming from the Production Maximo server. Perhaps they are testing functionality from a test server, or maybe a Sandbox server is being used and the same user has the same report set up on that server and the extra email(s) they are receiving are, in fact, being sent from this other server.  Double check the other servers - you can use the View Scheduled Reports option from Report Administration to aid in this effort.  One suggestion we have that may help is to put the server name in the email Subject or Comments section when the report is scheduled.

7/8/18 - As Robinmav noted in January, the above may not always work and has provided an alternate solution. See comments section for details. Thanks Robinmav

• The other known possible cause is related to the fact that a complex report that takes extra time to process will appear to Birt to be hung and it will restart it. Eventually these newly spawned jobs will all finish  and the emails will all be sent.  By default if the RUN phase of a report (the SQL phase) takes longer than 15 minutes the issue can present itself.  This 15 minute setting can be changed so if you feel this is the issue (and you can verify this usually be checking the report usage log to see how long the report took to complete)  you can change it as follows:

Goto -> System Configuration/Platform Configuration/Cron Task Setup

Select -> REPORTLOCKRELEASE cron task

Change Parameter-> LOCKINTERVALINMINUTES to the desired value - say 30, for example

Save changes

Restart the Maximo Application server to ensure new value is activated

There's generally no repercussions to making this change but bare in mind that it's for all scheduled reports. There is no ability to change it for specific reports.

7/8/18 - added a new possible cause

• a new third cause of this issue appeared in Maximo 7.6.0.8. It was identified and fixed under APAR IJ01148. It is fixed in Maximo 7.6.1.0. For any release on, or after 7.6.08 you will need an iFix to address this issue.  As StevenShull pointed out in the comments this particular issue will affect all cron tasks, not only reporting and there is a workaround. See details in his comment below.  Thank you StevenShull.

In most cases the multiple emails are caused by one of the above situations.

That's all for now.