Recently I came across a business requirements wherein Customer wanted to check if a WebI report can be scheduled every month at a frequency which is not consistent across months and also the days (of the month) when the report should run changes across months.

For instance, Lets assume we are currently in the month of March. Customer wants that in the month of April the Report should refresh on 2nd Working day (4th April) and 5th working day ( 7th April) however for month of May there shouldn’t be any refresh of the report however for the month of June the scheduled refresh should happen only on 1st June and 3rd June. and so on for future months.

If we look at various options available to users under “Recurrence” drop down ( as shown below), this type of requirements can’t be addressed (although “Specific Day of the Month” looks bit closer but it can’t handle change in the days when we move from one month to another)  –

WebI – Schedule Recurrence Options

Here, the option to define a “Calendar” comes very handy and can easily handle the complex scheduling requirement as mentioned in the above use case –

WebI Schedule Option – Calendar

Through the option of Calendar, you can select any Day of the calendar as “Run Day” or “Non-Run Day”.

(As the name suggests “Run Day(s)” are the days when you would like the scheduled report to get triggered and “Non-Run Day(s)” are the days when you don’t want the schedule to get triggered.)

Calendar Run Days for Schedule

Please note – The calendar can be defined within Central Management Console -> Define -> Calendars

The good part is, that this “Calendar” can be defined for as many number of years in future as you want ( I tried for next 50 years from now, it works!) and the “Run Days” in the Calendar can be changed at later point of time, if you think the calendar was not defined correctly during the initial setup.

Hope, you found this blog useful.