Wishlist: Reports, option to not send email if results are empty

I was thinking about this, and for PINES, I don't think it would work for us to not get an email at all if a report generates an empty result set. I can think of several use cases where we would definitely want to know if the result set was empty. Also, I think it would be confusing to end users not to receive the email they're used to seeing.

After discussing this with Terran (who marked this bug confirmed), I can understand the impetus for the request, but I don't think it's a good idea as default behavior. Maybe a new YAOUS that would make this a preference would be okay with me.

I agree with Chris that reports should tell you when they're done, regardless of the content. In fact, I'd go further and suggest that this is something we should not allow. There's a strong analogy to overdue notices here, where if there are no notices to generate the assumption by staff is often that something went wrong instead of that everything is working as intended.

Instead, I think it would be useful (and should be possible) to include the number of rows that the report contains in the email. Then, if it's zero and that's the expected case requiring no further attention, the email can simply be ignored.

Thoughts?

And, to extend that a little further, a simple content filter looking for, say, " 0 row(s)" in the body could get Josh the behavior he's seeking by discarding such messages.

>>Instead, I think it would be useful (and should be possible) to include the number of rows that the report contains in the email. Then, if it's zero and that's the expected case requiring no further attention, the email can simply be ignored.<<

I was thinking of that too, but I wasn't sure if that was feasible. For my use cases, that would work because I have several reports that are almost always 0 and I only care about them if they have a result.

I was really thinking this would be an optional, non default setting per report. Not a default behavior or a YAOUS. I agree that in most situations knowing that the report was run, and that it had no results is useful.

I think than in our use case we just had a situation where having any results was rare for some locations, so it was frustrating to have to check the report again and again.

I like the idea of including the row count in the email. I think that would largely solve the issue. Thanks for that suggestion.
Josh