All ideas are welcome. Just because the Idea doesn't make it into the product immediately does not make it a bad idea.
It would be great to have a button, likely in the Parameter page for Transform, that would delete xls reports from the report directory if the report is inactive or no longer registered in DSW. This should not be an automatic process run by the service but should be available to run manually as needed.
Note: if not on the parameter page I have alternative locations in mind.
One Scenario for justification:
On audits we typically run the entire set of teams 3 times. The first time we are just getting the data to flow to the target and have all rules and reports run without error. Then we start to vet relevancy rules and then make a second pass. We then spend the reaming time vetting the existing reports and authoring new reports, this includes inactivating many reports that are not appropriate for the final result set. On the last day of the audit we delete the report directory on the App Server and make one final run to produce a clean set of reports that can be delivered to the client.
The only reason for this final run is to produce a clean set of reports. In the best cases this takes half a day to run at a time where we really can't afford half a day of interruption. Too often it is much worse than half a day and sometimes we know processing would take more than a day so we have to skip this final step and either deliver reports we shouldn't or manually sort though every report and delete any that should not exist.
We would literally save hours at every audit if this simple feature existed.
I suspect this feature would not just benefit audits, it should make sense for other apps and really any project type.
Jeremiah Gilmore
