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News Sawmill 8.5.5 is now available. This is the latest
minor upgrade to Sawmill, improving reporting performance, adding
some minor functionality, and fixing a few bugs. It is a free
upgrade for Sawmill 8.5 users, and also a free upgrade for Sawmill
8.0/8.1 users (though your profiles and databases will need to be
converted). You can download Sawmill 8.5.5 from http://sawmill.net/download.html
. Please send your feedback about your experiences with Sawmill.
Sawmill 7 users can upgrade to Sawmill 8 for half of the license
price; or if you have Premium Support, the upgrade is free. Major
features of Sawmill 8 include support for Oracle and Microsoft SQL
Server databases, a completely redesigned web interface, better
multi-processor and multi-core support, and role-based
authentication control.
This issue of the Sawmill Newsletter gives an example of
generating daily scheduled reports to timestamped directories, so
each new report doesn't overwrite the report from the day before.
Get The Most Out Of Sawmill With Professional Services
Looking to get more out of your statistics from Sawmill? Running
short on time, but need the information now to make critical
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possibly never realized was readily available in reports. Sawmill is
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Services. For more information, a quote, or to speak directly with a
Professional services expert contact consulting@flowerfire.com.
Tips & Techniques: Generating Scheduled Reports To Timestamped
Directories
The Sawmill Scheduler allows a variety of actions to be executed
periodically, including database updates, and scheduled reports.
(8.5.5 also adds an option to run an arbitrary command line from the
Scheduler). A typical installation has a nightly database update of
all changing profiles (profiles which have new log data generated
each day), sometimes followed by a report generation. Reports can be
emailed, or they can be generated to disk.
When reports are generated periodically to disk, the Schedule asks
for a particular pathname to which the report should be written. If
only yesterday's report is needed, that works fine, and each report
overwrites the previous day's report. But to generate a series of
historical reports to disk, they need to be rotated, or each written
to a different location. Fortunately, Sawmill's Scheduler makes this
possible, through the use of embedded Salang in the directory name.
Salang, the Sawmill language, is a full-featured
scripting language which is used throughout Sawmill, for log
filters, database filters, log format plug-ins, custom actions,
snapons, and more (the entire web interface to Sawmill is written in
Salang). In certain cases, Salang code can be embedded in a
parameter value using the tokens {= and =}; it will be automatically
evaluated, and the result inserted back into the position of the
bracketed range. For instance, a value of "Hello {=1+1=} U" will be
converted to "Hello 2 U", as the Salang expression 1+1 is evaluated
to 2. One place this is supported, is in the "Output directory"
option of the Scheduler page for "Generate report files." A Salang
expression embedded in the filename can be used to create a
different directory each day.
To create a schedule which generates timestamped reports, start in
the Scheduler and click New Schedule. Enter a name
like "Timestamped Daily Single-Page Summary" in the Name
field, and click the pencil icon ([No action defined]) to define an
action. Choose as the Action "Generate report files," the Profile,
and the Report you want to generate (in this case,
Single-page Summary). Then enter the expression in the Output
directory. The screen shot below doesn't show the whole
expression, but it's:
 {='/d/Sawmill Reports/' .
replace_all(substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/',
'')=}
Here's what it looks like on the screen:
We'll examine the mechanics of that expression below. For now, click
OK, choose a scheduled time, Save Changes, and you're
done. Every night, it will generate reports to a directory with a
name like:
 /d/Sawmill Reports/17Jan2012
You can test it right now, if you like, by clicking Run Now.
On Windows, there's one wrinkle: because backslashes are used as
dividers in Windows, and also as escape characters in Salang, you
need you use two backslashes any time you want a directory divider,
like this:
 {='C:\\Sawmill Reports\\' .
replace_all(substr(epoc_to_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/', '')=}
which will give you reports in a directory with a name like:
 C:\\Sawmill Reports\\17Jan2012
Breaking Down The Expression
The complicated part of this process is the expression, so let's
take a minute to look at how it works, working outward in layers
from now().
1. "now()" returns the current time in EPOC format (seconds since
January 1, 1970, UTC).
2. Working outward, "epoc_to_local_date_time(now())" returns the local
time on the Sawmill server (not UTC) as a string, something like
"17/Jan/2012 12:34:56".
3. Working outward, "substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11)"
returns the first 11 characters of that, which will be
"17/Jan/2012".
4. Working outward,
"replace_all(substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/',
'')" removes all /s (replacing them with empty strings), yielding
"17Jan2012". This isn't necessary on Windows, but on other
platforms, those /s will become directory dividers, which you
probably don't want.
5. Finally, "'/d/Sawmill Reports/' .
replace_all(substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/', '')"
concatenates "/d/Sawmill Reports/" to the value computed, yielding
the final pathname, "/d/Sawmill Reports/17Jan2012".
Advanced Applications
Since the code in the {==} section is Salang, it can do anything
Salang can do, which is pretty much anything any programming
language can do. Salang can call other programs, create and call
subroutines, read information from files, make network connections
(functionality for HTTP, HTTPS, and LDAP, in particular, are
included in Sawmill's Salang libraries), etc. So the directory could
name could be computed in any way, e.g., looking it up the profile
name in a database server via an HTTP request, computing an LDAP DN
from that, looking up the group with a query to an LDAP server, and
using the group name in the directory name. The most common
situation is just to embed a timestamp, but more advanced
calculations are possible.
Also, the Subject of an emailed report can contain Salang in a {==}
section, to timestamp the emailed report, or to include other
information (date range of database, etc.).
Professional Services
This newsletter describes the use of Salang to generate scheduled
reports to timestamped directories. If you need a different
timestamp format than the one shown above, or a more advanced
computed directory name, our Sawmill Experts can help. Contact consulting@sawmill.net
for more information.
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