Demistrifying the black art: everything you need to understand Reports and Alerts in AxCMS.net and develop your own.

Reports and Alerts are the two user-notification mechanisms in AxCMS.net MS. Both are a part of the workflow support. Reports are generated once a day. Sample reports are "Pages created recently" or "Documents waiting to be published".  Alerts are generated immediately when a certain action takes place. Sample alert is "Publishing Request" which is triggered every time publishing is requested for any  page. Essentially both reports and alerts are lists of objects fullfilling certain criteria. There is a plenty of pre-defined reports and alerts coming with AxCMS.net. As a developer you can create your custom reports and alerts and add them to AxCMS.net. This article helps you to understand reports and alerts architecture and develop your custom reports and alerts.

Base class for the reports is AxReport and for alerts - AxAlert (which derives from AxReport). Both implement IServiceTask interface. It means, they are scheduled as Service Tasks and are executed inside AxCMS.Service. Report subscriptions are stored directly in the AxServiceTask table as recurring tasks (executed every 24h starting with the time of the fist subscription). Alerts subscriptions are stored in the AxUserAlert table. Users subscribes for an alert for some specific category (and its subtree). So it is possible to be immediately informed about important events and don't be over-spammed at the same time. When an alert is triggered, an entry in AxServiceTask is created, which is executed only once.

Learn more: