This time around it will be very short topic. I just want you to know that there is this old/new feature which was introduced in NPrinting version April 2020 and that it is great! So what is it?
Quick look at release notes says it all:
Dynamic email, CC and BCC
Qlik NPrinting April 2020 release notes (link)
You can send emails generated from publish tasks to dynamic lists of recipients in TO, CC, and BCC field. Recipient lists can be created in Qlik NPrinting as new fields or can come from Qlik variables.
Since the other change to that version of NPrinting introduced official support for Windows 2019 OS some say there is not much freshness in that releases, but are they really right? I don’t think so.
Introducing possibility of setting up NPrinting publish task with mail section being practically fully dynamic is a game changer. Why? Because it opens possibilities of how you can test your distribution and how you can distribute your reports.
Testing
Until April 2020 there was no possibility of doing full/proper testing of reports which are sent to recipients via email and those recipients have their own filters or section access. With this feature you can setup up to 3 Alternate emails in user profiles. You can also leverage Qlik variable to contain that email address. When creating publish task in email section you can now toggle to who you send those reports. For a test you can (for example) create publish task, add all required reports and recipients (users/groups) but setup yourself as “Alternate email” in their profiles and choose alternate email as a TO: address in task email section. When you run this task, all reports will be produced respecting user settings like roles, filters or section access however they will be send to alternate email.
Alternative distributions:
We can use this great functionality to create “dummy” recipient filters. Imagine you have a situation where you want to send a report (in Excel format summary for a Country + html embedded report in email body) to group of country sales representatives. For this exercise you could use recipient country filter, but what if one representative has more than 1 country associated and needs to receive individual reports? At this stage using “cycle” functionality will not be sufficient as each country report should be sent also as individual email in the scenario I am trying to present. In this situation you can create “dummy” users. Each of them can have dummy email like: user: Australia, email: australia@australia.com, user: Canada, email: canada@canada.com etc… You can associate to each of those countries emails of representatives who need to receive reports about them. This association can be done again as alternate email or variable having comma separated email listed associated with country. When setting up task you can setup dummy country users as recipients but use variable or alternate email as email recipient.
Things to remember:
Although alternative email, CC, BCC can be added from variable there is still requirement to have user or group of users with adequate role present for the report to run.
Using dynamic emails works only with email distribution. Keep in mind that distribution to other destinations like News Stand, Folder or Qlik Sense hub still works of user profile who is attached to task.
Enjoy!
NPrinting Adventures 