How do you automate automated reports?

Question

We currently use Data Reviewer and versioned editing in Desktop 10.3.1 with add-in modifications to provide mandatory QC on data maintenance; Reviewer does not enforce validation rules by itself.  We do not have a specific QA team, quality is editor and peer-managed with software support.

We've automated the reviewer checks per edit okay, and my supervisor is asking me to implement a system to assist QA by regularly checking entire datasets (or sets of datasets) for compliance and forwarding these reports to theme custodians for analysis and correction.

In the Data Reviewer Docs for report generation it describes how you generate the reports manually, which is great and the reports are useful (see attached), but how do you actually automate their production without manually using the tools from the Reviewer result table?

I thought there was an ArcTool for it just like 'Execute Reviewer Batch Job' but I don't see anything which seems to allow this, nor is there anything I can find in the documentation.

test 1031 perf report.xls

JenniferKennedy · Answer

I do use Workflow Manager (WMX) and Data Reviewer a lot - but I've never auto-generated a report.  While I haven't tested this recently, I'd be surprised if a new tool for exporting the report has been added (looks like it doesn't exist in 10.6.1, in the Data Reviewer toolset).  While WMX can indeed be automated to various degrees, and while it can create Data Reviewer sessions and run batch jobs, I don't believe it has a built in way to generate the reports.  Well, let me clarify - WMX does have a reporting function - so maybe it does to some degree; but it would not be an easy GP tool button-click "export report"; you'd have to do extensive formatting and some SQL work to get the results you need (to the best of my knowledge).

You do also have the ability to do those things mentioned - create a DR session, run DR batch jobs - outside of WMX, with the Data Reviewer GP tools.  That could definitely be run by a ModelBuilder tool, or a python script.  That toolbox does not have a tool for generating the report, though (in 10.6.1, that I can see).

If you have python skills, it probably would not be impossible to interrogate the Data Reviewer workspace itself, perform some joins and export the Data Reviewer results to an Excel sheet.  One of my coworkers, I believe, has made tools that act on the Data Reviewer workspace and generate some derived outputs - exporting and reformatting the Data Reviewer results so that clients who don't have Data Reviewer could review the results.  Unfortunately I don't believe we've created a tool to generate a report, though.

AndrewQuee · Answer

Just following up on this I still haven't found a method inside ArcGIS, although I did notice some relevant  other threads here.

Looking at the documentation again, it does appear that you can build a review workflow in workflow manager and then automate it through the python workflow manager module.  Potentially this could be controlled via ModelBuilder and Workflow Manager Tools.

Has anyone actually done this and to successfully automate automatic reports?