Can you email a report from a workflow?

Here is a question that was brought to me and it’s an interesting one of course. I would assume that most places would probably find this useful especially when a PO or PR is approved and having it email a BIRT report in Maximo 7 automatically.  It would be a great feature to have.

I don’t have a solution for you guys, but here are my initial thoughts on this. You know that you can already schedule and email BIRT reports so I’m thinking there must be a way to do this from the back end as well.  If you think about how this BIRT report scheduling works, then you can probably see where I’m going with this.  The way this scheduling and emailing PDF reports is this, it saves the report information in the database and a CRON task is probably running in the background continuously checking for reports that need to be run.  The CRON task will take care of running the report and emailing it to the user you specify.  I do know that there is a MBO called “REPORTSCHED” which is the table that holds all the schedule BIRT report information such as report name, email users, timezone, email subject, etc.  So what I’m thinking, you may be able to use escalations or a custom action from a workflow that will get the info needed from a PO or PR and insert a record into this table to automatically schedule and email reports.  Now that I’m thinking, this may require some custom java classes to get it to work, but I think this is certainly achievable.