How to test email sending with NP19 reports

[fionna51]

Hi guys,

I am currently working on migrate NP16 report to NP19. We have thousands of users outside of my company. We provide Qlikview application for external users and also send comprehensive PDF reports as attachment via emails. The application and reports are both with huge data. After migration/rebuilt in NP19, we want to test email process. In NP16, we used real user information and replace email address with one of our company group email. Then we can get thousands emails in this company email but each email with attached reports only for one user. (one user may have multiple entity access and received multiple attachments in same email)

My question is, NP19 does not allow email sharing which means we cannot use this group email to replace all user emails. And of course we cannot really send testing email to real user email addresses. Could you guys please share your experience how to deal with this testing? (We also want to see real performance for sending those emails/reports)

Thank you.

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

Hi,

Question 1: My question is, NP19 does not allow email sharing which means we cannot use this group email to replace all user emails.

Answer 1: email is unique Id of the user - cannot be shared. This is documented in official helo document: https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/April2020/Content/NPrinting/Recipients&Users/Create-users-filt... (...Email: Enter a unique and valid email address that the user will use to log on....)

Question 2: Could you guys please share your experience how to deal with this testing? 

Answer 2: Until NPrinting April 2020 my testing would be to use local folders as a destination. You can configure them in Destination section and folder can contain automatically created UserName subfolder. I would then inspect those folders to see if they would have correct content. I agree - this is not SMTP testing and will not allow me to asses how SMTP server is going to handle amount of emails being sent and the size of attachment, but there is no other way about it. As a alternate solution you could use dummy SMTP server: https://github.com/rnwood/smtp4dev

From version April 2020 you have now possibility of using Alternate User Email! This would do exactly what you want.

• See this for user properties in April 2020: https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/April2020/Content/NPrinting/Recipients&Users/Create-users-filt...
• See this for task properties in April 2020: https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/April2020/Content/NPrinting/DistributionSchedulesAutomation/Di...

You could create alternate user email being your company group email.

[fionna51]

Hi @Lech_Miszkiewicz,,

Thanks for your info. I checked the links you provided, it sounds great. Because we already have Feb 2020 version installed, hard for me to try the alternative email option. Before I give suggestion to our company, one thing I still want to confirm that all alternate emails can be shared by different users? From the link, we can see User email still have unique email restriction, but all three Alternate Emails do not. Alternate email can also be used as User Email (To). It sounds like User Email is part of unique key for user, but in real email process users can share email address.

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

Hi,

Did you miss something in my previous post? Version you are on does not have alternative emails. Only April 2020 onwards has at the moment and soon June 2020 will have it too...

as per your other questions I will test and give you an answer later

[Lech_Miszkiewicz · Accepted solution]

Ok, I have quickly done my testing...

and yes - Alternate Email from NPrinting April 2020 is the solution you want to use.

Now down the questions:

From the link, we can see User email still have unique email restriction, but all three Alternate Emails do not.

Correct - email is a unique identifier of user.

I disagree that people can share the same email - it is not possible. I can agree that many people can have access to the same email (they can configure their  mailbox to receive emails, but they use 1 and only 1 account!).  From that perspective email = unique user id. In NPrinting this is used to identify users, assign filters, groups, roles etc... Users can use their email to login to NPrinting console, so it needs to be unique.

now Alternate email,

It obviously has completely different purpose. Its purpose is not to identify users, its purpose is to provide alternate address to send email with content assigned to a user. So If I have user A and user B and each of this users has some recipient filters assigned to them in NPrinting I can test what they will get by:

• adding both users as recipients

• choosing email as a destination for them

• choosing alternate email as destination email

 

• once you run this task all user attributes will be used to produce report (filters, etc...), but report will be only sent to alternate email.

This is exactly what you need to test what final users will receive before sending them actual reports.

hope this helps.

[fionna51]

This excellent @Lech_Miszkiewicz ! Like you said this is exactly what I need. Thank you so much!

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

That is a good excuse for upgrade 🙂 I would wait few days. NPrinting June 2020 is just around the corner and it looks even better than NPrinting April 2020...