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Deferred Receipt is a Managed Reporting feature that allows users to submit a Managed Reporting procedure that executes in the background. The user then views the finished report output from the Deferred Report Status interface in Managed Reporting or Dashboard. This is in contrast to procedures submitted for immediate execution, where the browser waits for the request to finish.
From a security perspective, deferred requests are accepted by the WebFOCUS Reporting Server in the same way as immediate requests. If WebFOCUS Reporting Server security is enabled, the deferred request must connect with a valid WebFOCUS Reporting Server user ID and password. The user ID can come from cgivars.wfs or from a node profile, or it may have been entered by the user in a WebFOCUS Reporting Server sign-on page.
When a request completes, its output is stored in a file on the WebFOCUS Reporting Server under the install_directory/srv/wfs/dfm_dir. The output is accompanied by a corresponding file that contains the user ID who submitted the request and other information. The WebFOCUS Reporting Server ensures that only the user who submitted the deferred job can retrieve, delete, and check the status of the output file. The WebFOCUS Reporting Server Administrator (the user identified by the server_admin_id keyword in the edaserve.cfg file) can also view and delete any deferred output, but can do so only at the file level or by using the Reporting Server Console.
Access to dfm_dir should be restricted so that the user ID that started the WebFOCUS Reporting Server has read/write access. Read access should be controlled so that unauthorized users cannot gain access to the directory.
A deferred ticket is stored in the Managed Reporting Repository for each user deferred request. The tickets are stored by each Managed Reporting user, and users can only see their own deferred tickets. The ticket contains the node of the WebFOCUS Reporting Server on which the output resides.
When a user requests Deferred Status, all of the tickets of the user are processed at once. If credentials are required to retrieve status from one of the servers, the dynamic server sign-on form appears. If one or more of the servers is temporarily unavailable, the status of those tickets display as unknown.
If for some reason a user has submitted a deferred request one day with the user ID user1, and then submits the same request the next day with the ID user2 and checks deferred status, the user will be unable to access the request from the previous day and will see a message:
Submitted by Server Id: user1 Current Id is: user2
To access the first report, the user needs to close the session and log on to the WebFOCUS Reporting Server as user1.
When WebFOCUS receives a report request for a specific Reporting Server node, there is an option to configure a different node to route the request to if it is a deferred request. This can improve response time for interactive requests by redirecting the long running jobs. You can specify default static credentials for these two server nodes in cgivars.wfs and/or their corresponding WebFOCUS Client node profiles. You should ensure that if you do specify default credentials for these nodes, the IDs specified are identical. If they are different, the ID used to submit the job will not match the ID used to retrieve its output and users will be unable to retrieve their own deferred output.
When you configure a Cluster Node for WebFOCUS, it is important that the default credentials configured (if any) for the cluster node and each of its member nodes are set to the same user ID. If they are different, the ID used to submit the job will not match the ID used to retrieve its output, and users will be unable to retrieve their own deferred output.
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