Enumerating Financial Reports via Workspace database

Disclaimer : This post will talk about direct database access. Do not perform unless you are sure you know what you are doing and I’m not liable! I’m just passing along information I’ve learned in case it helps you out….
Recently, we decided that we wanted to review all of our reports to determine which ones we could drop and which ones we should keep. Over the past 7 years, things have accumulated and we literally have thousands of reports gasp between all of the backups, Work In Process, and flat out duplication. In order to handle the review of this we wanted to assign prople to review specific sections of the reports. I was asked to provide a nice excel ‘report’ that would break down the report / folder hierarchy so that we could assign it.
That is when I realized that I really couldn’t locate a tool / report that would generate such a report listing!
In the old 7.2.5 version of Reports, it was relatively easy to get this information as all of the report information (including actual report content) was stored in a single database table.
With System 9 and Workspace, this is no longer true. With Workspace, the files are stored on the server’s file system in a manner consistent with the hierarchy of your reports/folders. Intially I thought I would be able to use this file system to build my report using simple DOS commands. (i.e. dir /s > reportlist.txt) Unfortunately though, the file names of the reports and folders are not ‘human readable’. (In order to decipher it, you’d have to go into the workspace database and x-ref these names to a table, etc)  Fortunately; however, you can build a report listing via SQL. The script below recursively builds a report with the following output :

(NOTE: Actually the script includes more columns of output; however, for display purposes here, I’m only showing the name and description)

Report Name     Description
AnnualReports NULL
===Actg-YContractual Obligations – Multiple Entities Contractual Obligations
===Annual Validation Summary Annual Validation Summary
===Customers and End User Markets NULL
====== 001 – End Use Markets Book End Use Markets Book
====== 002 – Top Customers Book Top Customers Book
====== 010 – Customers Book Reports – Corp NULL
========= Revenue by Top Customers – All Sectors – Pr Yr Comp Customer Revenues
========= Revenue by Top Customers – All Sectors – Pr Yr Comp -TEST Customer Revenues
====== 020 – Markets Book Reports – Corp NULL
========= Revenue by End User Markets – All Sectors End Use Markets
====== 030 – All Sectors – End Use Markets – Pr Yr Comp NULL
========= End Use Markets – Pr Yr Comp Customer Revenues

SQL 2005+ Query
USE BIPLus_prod;

GO

WITH Reports (PARENT_FOLDER_UUID, CONTAINER_UUID, NAME, DESCRIPTION, Level, Sort, CREATION_DATE, LAST_MODIFIED_DATE)

AS

(

— Anchor member definition

SELECT d.PARENT_FOLDER_UUID, d.CONTAINER_UUID, d.NAME, d.DESCRIPTION, 0 as level, cast(NAME as nvarchar(1024)) as sort, d.CREATION_DATE, d.LAST_MODIFIED_DATE

FROM V8_CONTAINER as d

WHERE d.PARENT_FOLDER_UUID = ‘0000011b42b29e00-0000-0b4d-c0a8e22a’ UNION ALL

— Recursive member definition

SELECT d1.PARENT_FOLDER_UUID, d1.CONTAINER_UUID, d1.NAME, d1.DESCRIPTION, Level + 1, cast(Sort + ‘|’ + d1.Name as nvarchar(1024)), d1.CREATION_DATE, d1.LAST_MODIFIED_DATE

FROM V8_CONTAINER as d1

INNER JOIN Reports AS r

ON d1.PARENT_FOLDER_UUID = r.CONTAINER_UUID

)
— Statement that executes the CTE

SELECT replicate(‘ ‘,Level) + NAME, DESCRIPTION, CREATION_DATE, LAST_MODIFIED_DATE, Level, PARENT_FOLDER_UUID, CONTAINER_UUID FROM Reports order by sort
GO

How this works :
The table V8_CONTAINER holds the main part of the report / folder entry data. In this table you will find Names, Creation Dates, Modified Dates, Owner name, UUID, and Parent UUID information. In order to build a hierarchy, you will need to pay careful attention to the UUID fields. CONTAINER_UUID is the internal name of the object in Workspace. (i.e. non-user friendly name) PARENT_FOLDER_UUID is a reference back to the item’s parent.
With this in mind, if you know the UUID of your starting point, you can simply recurse from there to get a listing of all folders and subsequent reports. In the script above I start off looking for an entry that is the starting point of our reports that we wanted to audit. For your purposes you will need to change this to what your starting point is.

NOTE : If you want to get everything in the table, use REPORTMART. REPORTMART is the parent to everything in the table.
I hope my walk through wasn’t terribly boring and helpful. I apologize for only providing a script that works in SQL Server; however, that is what we use at our site and there should be enough explanation here for someone relatively proficient with Oracle to write a similar script if they desire.