New report permission prevent creating reports from shared templates

[Lindsay Stratton]

When a report definition is created/run on a shared template, the template cannot be later deleted - such as if it is outdated or wrong, etc. The process of tracking down a report owner to delete old reports/output is very frustrating.

Ideally (wishfully) it would be great if there were some kind of permissions to prevent reports being run directly from a shared template, or a mechanism to force non-template owners to clone a shared template, or a way to delete old templates even someone else has related report defs and output.

[Jennifer Pringle (jpringle-u)]

+1 to preventing reports being directly run off shared template or a mechanism to force non-template owners to clone a shared template

(Or maybe we just need a different mechanism entirely to allow global admins to create shared templates for an entire consortium)

[Beth Willis (willis-a)]

I see the issue here, but I think it could be problematic to require users to clone shared templates in order to create reports from them. If the original template is modified for any reason, the cloned versions of the template still exist and users may still be running reports from them. This is especially likely if the report running on a schedule. This has happened multiple times in our consortium. In some ways, I wish users could not clone the shared templates because it is easier to maintain just one copy. But, I am not advocating for that position, either.

I would prefer to be able to delete a shared template even if other users had generated reports/output from it. But, I am not sure how this could work with scheduled reports.

I think it would help to know which templates are clones and what template they were cloned from. I'm not sure this link exists, though.

[Susan Morrison (smorrison425)]

+ 1 to Beth's comment. I think many of our library staff are still not comfortable with cloning templates, and requiring them to do so to run reports would likely be an issue, so I'd also prefer to have a permission to delete shared templates even if there are connected to reports/outputs.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

Maybe instead of fully deleting the templates, they could be flagged deleted and hidden from the interface.

This should allow the existing template outputs to still open.

And maybe when a scheduled report based on a deleted template tries to run, it could send a nice error message to the emails associated with it?

[Andrea Neiman (aneiman)]

Noting that the new implementation of Angular Reports does still block deletion of shared templates if they are the source of any reports, but it does make it easier to view the reports (and owners of said) that are being used by the template.