Forum Discussion

DavidMinker's avatar
DavidMinker
Qrew Trainee
5 years ago

Trigger Report Subscription via Pipelines Webhook channel

We have a report that is set to send on a subscription basis but, as we know, that's limited to 1x per day send.  We now need to trigger the report to send 4x per day. 

We also know that calling a URL that looks like this: 
https://<<URLROOT>>/db/<<DBID>>?a=sendsubscription&id=<<REPORTID>> 
would trigger the report to send on-demand ... so there's a way to do it - we just need to find a way to schedule the invocation of that URL.

So, the thought was that we could use the Webhook Pipeline to make the call on a schedule - problem is, we've been unsuccessful - likely due to authentication - in making the call successfully.

Any thoughts / tips / tricks on how to pull this all together?

Dave 


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Dave Minker
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  • MarkShnier__You's avatar
    MarkShnier__You
    Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend
    5 years ago
    I have asked various people at QuickBase and they say it is not possible. I also tried the same thing as you did to try to jam in a URL into a pipeline and every time it failed on authentication. The problem is that the URL is not a proper API  (?a=sendsubscription&id=xx)

    A  suggestion might be to have a Helper table with a Dummy record (Record ID# = 1) which contains an embedded report of the contents of the subscription.   That report link field would match the 1 of the Record ID# to a formula 1 on the detail records.

    And you can have a pipeline run several times per day and it will update a date time field on that dummy record to be the current date and time. That within trigger a notification. You would have to contrive the notification recipients to be the recipients that you wanted the subscription report to go to.  

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    Mark Shnier (YQC)
    Quick Base Solution Provider
    Your Quick Base Coach
    http://QuickBaseCoach.com
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    • DavidMinker's avatar
      DavidMinker
      Qrew Trainee
      5 years ago
      Thanks, Mark - I understand your approach, but agree that it's super-contrived and was really hoping for a more straightforward way to accomplish this.  I can't imagine this is an infrequent request / need from the community at large and don't fully understand how there isn't a sanctioned way to meet this need.

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      Dave Minker
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  • AustinK's avatar
    AustinK
    Qrew Commander
    5 years ago
    I have also been looking into this over the past few weeks. This isn't exactly what you want but you may be able to adapt it. I am considering doing the same.

    https://community.quickbase.com/blogs/brian-cafferelli1/2020/06/01/how-can-i-email-a-report

    At the bottom of this this is one big caveat that I will copy over to here.

    Reports emailed by pipelines however, are static. This means that all recipients will receive the same version of the emailed report. Therefore, take care that all contents of reports emailed through pipelines are appropriate to share with all recipients of that email. Pipelines run using the permissions of the app builder who created the pipeline.
    • DavidMinker's avatar
      DavidMinker
      Qrew Trainee
      5 years ago

      Thanks to you both for the input / feedback.

      What I ended up doing was creating my own version of the report in Pipelines with a combination of the QB and Mailgun channels and used some Jinja + Markdown to build, essentially, the same report I was triggering via the Scheduled Reports. 

      I'm relatively certain this same solution will not be viable for future cases where I do need a variable (non-static) report based on recipient ... but at least I can move this ball forward.



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      Dave Minker
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