Scheduled jobs creating EXCEL Report never update end execution time

Products

• Vantage Storage Resource Manager

Issue/Introduction

 

Have a job in the schedule when the dasd storage group report produces a PDF report attached to an email works fine and everything else in the schedule runs on time. 

We switched the report attached to an email with an EXCEL spreadsheet and it runs but never updates the end time and we can see this in the access data base but it causes the other scheduled jobs not to run.

Why?

Environment

Release : 14.0

Component : CA Vantage Storage Resource Manager

Resolution

Microsoft Excel component that Windows Client uses, exporting data into .XLSX (Excel Workbook) file, cannot be made reliable when Windows Client Scheduler is running as a service. Unfortunately, Microsoft changed their restriction in Excel.

With respect to this fact we recommend the following circumvention:

Update your scheduled tasks to export data into CSV format, not xlsx format. The recipient then will import the CSV format as an excel file.

Update windows setting (list separator) to character ";" . List separator settings is under settings -> region $ language -> additional date, time, & regional settings -> change date, time, or number formats -> additional settings.

A Permanent fix for this limitation is planned for future release of WebUI (Web Client).

This solution is for the Scheduler running as a Service.

Otherwise If you just need the Excel file, you still can use the scheduler as an application but then there is a need of a logged in user on the machine.