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bmcwilliams's avatar
bmcwilliams
New Contributor
26 days ago

Book Viewer / Book Publishing Best Practices

Good afternoon,

I'm curious to see how other companies handle this situation.  We've recently launched a Dashboard allowing the vast majority of our user base, ~800 users, the ability to interact with and drilldown on their financials.

One of the growing pains we're experiencing with this change is that the users have the ability to create a PDF Book for their selected Locations + Children on whatever Cube View they're currently on.  So it could be one PDF or a lot (50+ locations).  Opening the Book Viewer creates a background server task which on its own doesn't seem to be an issue.

However, we have a couple of "triggering" events that cause an influx of our user base to all access the system for financial review and book publishing at the same time.  Prelim financials are ready to review, financials are closed, etc.

The problem we're experiencing seems to be when we have a lot of users all trying to create books at the same time it appears that their tasks are stepping on each other.  So either the process is taking longer than normal or the user is receiving a "Cannot access the file filepathandfilename.pdf because it is being used by another process."  And maybe the last error is something the user did but I don't know what that could have been honestly.

Just trying to get a feel if any other companies / users experience this kind of influx on Book Viewer all at once and how they handle.

Thanks,

Brandon

Books
dashboards
Reports

2 Replies

  • sameburn's avatar
    sameburn
    Icon for OneStream Employee rankOneStream Employee
    24 days ago

    Hi

    Have you considered setting the book output file(s) to folders marked by user in the file system. This way each user is only writing to their own folder and you don't have read / write conflicts

    You can use the substitution variable |UserName| in your output path to determine this

    Hope this helps

    Sam

  • bmcwilliams's avatar
    bmcwilliams
    New Contributor
    23 days ago

    Thanks Sam.  Could you clarify where this would be specified?  The error logs being returned appear to be specific to an individual user (ie 'Summary: The process cannot access the file 'C:\Users\username\AppData\Local.... .pdf' because it is being used by another process.' etc.).

    So maybe this piece is something the end user is doing to trigger this error since it appears to be a user's local file explorer and not necessarily referencing OneStream.

    I think my main concern is that these background jobs are all potentially stacking on each other.  Is it standard that opening a PDF Book Viewer via a Dashboard runs it as a background server task?