Mail anaplan report to email as attachment

Question

Hi, Is there any possibility to schedule anaplan report everyday as attachment to user email…

JaredDolich · Answer

@patchava

Agree with @KirillKuznetsov - You cannot raise an event in Anaplan yet (hopefully some day) as Kirill mentioned. The most popular way is to make use of the Anaplan REST APIs using an application that can POST/GET as well as generate an email. It generally follows this design pattern:

* Schedule an EXPORT out of Anaplan to see if an exception has been calculated.
* If so, EXPORT from Anaplan the relevant data and generate the body of the email which may/or may not contain attachments.
* Send the email

This  pattern, by the way, is how most automated processes work with Anaplan. I use it all the time to dynamically (on demand) generate statistical models that cannot be easily done in Anaplan. Then I send the results back into Anaplan. To the user, it looks like its on demand, but its really a listener.

I have seen one other method you might find useful as well and that is to create a web application of your own and establish a hyperlink in Anaplan that takes you to that web app. From there the user can raise an event of any kind. Biggest drawback here is one of security. You have to be really careful to use API V2 with a CA certificate. Your website should also be using an SSL. Try to avoid using basic authentication.

KirillKuznetsov · Answer

Hi @patchava,

There is no native feature in Anaplan to schedule reports as email attachments. However, it may be possible to script a solution using Anaplan Connect and an emailing library. You can refer to this article for an example.

Below are some of the instruments that Anaplan offers to resolve this kind of task:

* Anaplan Connect - is a batch file script that allows you to extract a particular module from Anaplan to any given folder on your server. Since it is a program you can set up a schedule using tools like Task Scheduler for MS. Then use some external tool for email distribution scheduling (this last bit you would have to search the web). 
* Another option is using Anaplan CloudWorks. This tool requires Amazon (AWS) S3 buckets, Google BigQuery tables, and Azure Blob, and if you have one of them in your company then I would suggest considering CloudWorks. 
* Anaplan API also can be considered for its flexibility.

Best regards,

Kirill