{EpicorERP} Running a Report to see what users are doing/printing

Question

I was wondering if anyone had a method of running a report to see what a user is doing in Epicor or what they are printing. We are having users report that in the middle of the night, when no one is here at the plant, there are 500 page reports being printed. We are able to see in the print queue who printed what, but the report doesn't match up with anything in our system. We would have for example a report called DailySales.rpt, but in the printer queue it would be something like hb986a87dthr.rpt. Just wondering if anyone else has seen this, or would have a solution that would let me see what a user is printing.

Answer 1

It is not possible to link the print job directly to the SysTask record because neither the print job number, the temp file, nor mac addresses are saved in Epicor for cross referencing. It can be approximated by looking at runtimes and the SysTask record.

You can create a BAQ and BAQ report to display Active and recently completed SysTask information by user. This will give you the report run, start/end times, user, and current status. If you need more detailed information such as the criteria used in the report, you can also join to the SysTaskParam table. Keep in mind that the SysTaskParam table is fully normalized by field name, so you may want to join multiple copies of the table with specific criteria if you need a lot of information. Unfortunately, for "print all pages" jobs, Epicor doesn't know how many pages the report will be until after the data is instantiated and then it is rendered in the reporting software, so you won't be able to get any estimate of number of pages or size.

There are many strategies for mitigating the issue you described. Here are a couple:

• You can use criteria within the BAQ to limit the number of records returned for a specific query
• You can create a subquery criteria from BAQ parameters to return no data when abnormally open parameters are used for the report (e.g. > 30 days range). You could also use this method with time gates based on the current system time.
• Retrain users