How Would You Like Your Report?

by Andrew Fuerste-Henry on Dec 10, 2019

When our partner libraries have a report they need to run regularly or want Koha to push data to them proactively, we can schedule that report to send via email on a recurring schedule. When we do so, we have several options for how the report results should be formatted. They're not huge differences, but they're worth documenting.

Here's the report I'm using for my demo:

The basic options

The cronjob will put the results of your report into the body of the email it sends you. That data can be formatted as HTML, text, TSV (tab-separated values), or CSV (comma-separated values). Here's what those look like when delivered:

Would you like some headers?

You'll notice that none of those include headers for the data. That can get a bit confusing. We can tell the report to include headers for text, TSV, and CSV formats (not for HTML).

What about an attachment?

Having the data right in the body of the email is great if you just need to see the results and act on them now. It's less good if you want to save them or put them into an existing spreadsheet. Luckily, we can tell Koha to also put the data into an attached file. You can see it in the last screenshot above, where I told Koha to include an attachment. You can see the file here. We can only include an attachment with text, TSV, and CSV formats.