Xaction Basics – Sending an Email

There are moments when working with the BI server that you will desire functionality that isn’t necessarily available through the server itself or any plugin that is currently out there.  In these situations, you will need xactions, which can be a little intimidating at first glance.  For this reason, we’ll provide some xactions that do some basic things for you to look at.  If you’d like to see a more in depth general introduction, check out this techcast by Mike Tarallo.

If you are coming from a fresh install with the sample database, you should have no problem running this .XACTION.  The only changes you need to make is to change the receiving email address, and the report being sent.  You should receive an email from the email you have set on your BI server as a default.

Make sure to put the file in the workspace when you open it through Pentaho Design Studio, otherwise it will not display any values.  The XML can still be edited this way, however.

After making your modification, save it to the solution directory from Design Studio (Eclipse) and go to PUC and refresh your repository.

Then double click on the solution.  You should see the following default message that shows the Action Sequence (.xaction) was successfully executed:

This is not all that pretty and actually could be another message.  It is simply saying that it was completed successfully and that long number is the unique ID for the document just created in the content repository.  At the end it shows what format it was.

You can execute this step using a URL into another application, another part of the suite, inside of PRD, or CDF.