How to use a Report or Page Trigger to generate a Publication when criteria are met

When you offer to trigger a report or page from your Publication, it only makes sense to start the process if the result does not produce a blank page. To achieve this we want to use a publication report trigger or page trigger to only generate the full publication or the specific page if certain criteria are met. You might want to only generate the publication if it has data as you don't want to send out a blank excel/ppt.

In Pyramid, Publication Report & Page triggers currently (Pyramid 2023.12) only work for Matrix Grids and not Tabular Grids. If you need to use a Tabular Grid in your publication, but you still want to use a Report Trigger that only generates the email if there is data available for the slicer selection. As a work around to use a Tabular Grid you can do the following:

Solution:

1.    Set up a discovery with a Tabular grid for your publication

2.    Add the discovery onto the publication slide

3.    Add on any required slicers & interact with the discovery

4.    Create a new discovery with a smaller matrix grid - this will be used for your trigger. Set this up so that if it's blank - you don't want the publication to generate

5.    In your publication - click on Report Trigger Manager

6.    You can select either a Report Trigger or a Page Trigger - Tick use trigger and set to " Trigger if True". Add a New Condition.

7.    Update the condition, select your Matrix Grid discovery, select the label, test, set, apply:

8.    You now need to interact the slicers with the Trigger and tick the Trigger:

9.    Save your Publication

10.    You can now schedule your publication. Make your selections using either Basic or Multiple and select the slicer options:

11.    Use the Trigger 

12.    This will work for a dynamic and a static distribution list

13.    You will see that the second filter option resulted in a blank Matrix Grid so the publication did not get produced.