[sims] Initiate report run from VBA

[crispybits]

Hi all

 

Couldn't find anything on this in search but point me to the thread I missed if it's been done before.

 

I know we can automate reports to run at certain times automatically, and I know we can write custom VBA code to run when we run a report from SIMS, but what I would like to do is to have a report (call it report A) run with some VBA code that then tells SIMS to run a second report (report B) to get additional data from another core area and then combine them. I've tried creating a single report that contains all the data I want in SIMS and if I try and get it all out in one go it messes the data up a fair bit, creating duplicate rows etc etc. I could VBA my way out of that but it would be clunky and I'd probably spend months finding new exceptions to rules to code into the macro so it keeps working as it should.

 

If I run a simplified version of this report (A), and then run a second simplified report (B), then I can manually splice the two together quite simply without the duplications etc. But I'd like staff to be able to run this themselves without a load of faffing about in Excel splicing 2 reports together. So ideally the custom macro I write on report A would automatically call report B from SIMS and then combine them behind the scenes.

 

Does anyone know if this is possible?

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

What you describe sounds familiar but I can't think where I've seen this before. What you are after is the VBA shell function to trigger commandreporter.exe (https://www.myonlinetraininghub.com/vba-shell) You'd need to either use trusted authentication if your staff use SSO for SIMS otherwise hard code the username and password for a SIMS account in to the Macro. Also make sure you have either copied the initial output already or give the new output a different name so you don't get a clash.

[Knil92]

It should be attached, but I created an excel sheet that can run a report without being logged into sims, so it should give you an idea of how to go about it.

SIMS Report.zip