best practice to edit report/need duplicate ability

[daveatkins]

I am wondering how people who are forced to use the nprinting product manage to develop complicated excel reports safely? There does not appear to be a way to copy an existing report easily in order to extend it (and then overwrite the original). Every time I go to make changes, it is a white knuckle adventure where I wonder if I will mess up the report and then end up having to rebuild it all from scratch. I have also had situations where I was halfway through making changes to a template and then had the connection fail, losing all my work because I am afraid to save the template until I am sure it works. This feels like a really bad way to live; please any advice?

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

Hi @daveatkins 

1. There are very easy ways of duplicating report  so you can work on the copy. Here are steps:

• export report: https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/June2020/Content/NPrinting/AdministeringQVNprinting/Import-exp...
• import as new report (when importing just give it a different name) https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/June2020/Content/NPrinting/AdministeringQVNprinting/Import-exp...
• once you finished working on copy of the report (export your copy again and use "replace" function to replace original report)
• Replace: https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/June2020/Content/NPrinting/AdministeringQVNprinting/Import-exp...

2. Regarding connection - It is not NPrinting issue and must be related to the quality of the network you are working with.

Screenshots :

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

another thought on top of what i wrote above...

I am usually not working on copy of the report as I feel comfortable enough to play with whatever I have in front of me. However If I work on the difficult report for backup purposes I can use the same functionality (Export) to take a backup of the working report, continue development on the same report and if my development is successful then great, If it is not then I can simply restore from the exported backup.

As a rule and good practice I do backup of whole repository daily in all my deployments! That way I can always roll back whole environment and restore it to any required day state.  

[daveatkins]

how do you do a backup/restore? Are you talking about running a task on the server, as an admin, to take a backup of the repo database and then doing a full restore if needed, or is there a way for developers to backup their work other than through the export/import process you described?

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

Single report backup - i just export a copy of working report using the method described. 

Repository backup - yes, i have a scheduled admin task which runs batch file with commands to take full repository db backup

regards