Beta-testers needed to test a new feature

The new release of NetWorx will have a new feature called automatic reports. It allows to export a report to a file or send it to an e-mail on a periodic basis.

Whoever wants to use it, I would appreciate your feedback on testing it. It's available for download here.

Hi Andrew,

I ran a quick test of the Beta, first to connect to my wireless adapter and that was OK, but when I tried to connect to the router, I could not.
I'd set my community name properly in fact I simply used the settings from an older portable that does connect to the router.
I toggled the newest Hidden Setting re Physical adapters but that didn't work either way.

The Beta didn't have any options to choose a driver (because it's the Portable version?).

Didn't get to the testing of the reporting to file because I couldn't add a path to the csv file

Didn't get to the testing of the reporting to e-mail yet. If I already have e-mail set up for notifications will those settings apply to reporting or are they separate and have to be entered even if the same as the Notifications?

J

EDIT:
the one problem was my firewall which blocked the attempt to connect to the router because this is a brand new instance of Networx.
the 2nd problem was I didn't see the option to select File or E-mail and the default was E-mail. I changed it to File and added the file path to the List.
the 3rd problem is that even though I configured e-mail correctly I got a message telling me to "Please specify your SMTP server and an e-mail address". The configure screen doesn't have a field for e-mail address supposedly because it's in the List.
I then set up e-mail in Notifications and it was accepted and the data in the common fields was the same in both the installed instance and the Beta instance. But I got the same message in the Beta instance when trying to Test or click [OK], it seems that error is meant to cover both the smtp address which was OK and the e-mail address which wasn't in the screen, the abscence of which caused the error screen.

EDIT #2
I had to click [Cancel] to exit the report e-mail config however it saved the settings. Back on the main screen I was able to click [Test] for e-mail and an e-mail was sent. At this point it didn't show any data though but there is data for both up and down so this is a bug. (using either HTML or csv) and, when checking the file test.csv, there was no data there either.

ok, i know why there were no figures, i noticed that the date was yesterday, and of course there was zero activity. more tomorrow when it's reporting apr 7.

my guess is that it functions correctly with the exception of that warning screen which may throw users off a bit. better to get that fixed. oh, it also resets the smtp port to 25 after i changed it to 587 then if i try again it leaves 587 but it shouldn't change it ever, it should assume that i'm right and leave it to me to fix if i'm wrong.

j

Hi Praxis,

Thank you for your valuable feedback. Indeed there was a couple of issues with this build.

I have fixed the setup e-mail server dialog (it shares the same e-mail settings throughout the app) and added a hint of what is expected to be entered.

Hi Andrew,

The e-mail config screen works now, no popup error window when clicking [OK].
I did have the correct e-mail address in the List and those tests did work yesterday in spite of the popup error window error.

The csv and HTML e-mails have the correct figures for the Beta for yesterday, at least they agree with the Usage Report.

The csv file was generated on April 7 @ 23:47 and the e-mail was generated on April 7 @ 23:53 (my time Eastern time on Daylight Savings) so it doesn't take into account the 240 minute Time Zone Offset to sync my time to UTC, my 'day' ends at 20:00 (my time).
I'm sure that the figures were for the day period ending at 20:00 and so the e-mail and file could have been created at 20:01 my time. This is NOT a serious problem for me because I send the e-mail to myself on the same computer but I suppose someone else might send it to a different location and want the e-mail sooner.

I'd forgotten to un-tick the option to Start with Windows in the Beta, so it started before the 'installed' instance and therefore the 'installed' instance didn't start. I only noticed this after starting the router and receiving e-mail and reading stuff in a forum, so the Beta has the correct figures for today (bigger) and the 'installed' figures are incorrect (smaller).
That means I have to wait until tomorrow to let the 'installed' Start with windows and once it has, manually start the Beta before logging into the router and connecting to the internet. That should produce identical figures for both which I'll then verify to the e-mail and csv file.

This is a Win7-SP1 Pro 64bit system.

J

Quote

Praxis

I'm sure that the figures were for the day period ending at 20:00 and so the e-mail and file could have been created at 20:01 my time. This is NOT a serious problem for me because I send the e-mail to myself on the same computer but I suppose someone else might send it to a different location and want the e-mail sooner.

Interesting, I just tested this with a positive time zone offset set in the hidden settings and it worked as expected, i.e. the file was created and e-mail was sent the first minute of the new period (even though the local time did not pass midnight). I will double check it again.

That's interesting Andrew because my stuff was created a few minutes before midnight, not a few minutes after midnight and not a few minutes after 8pm (20:00 which is UTC 00:00 offset by 240 minutes in Hidden Settings).

I'll obviously see tonight at 8:01pm.

You know what? And I can't be positive, but with the spread in time between the csv (23:47) and the e-mail (23:53) would that indicate that I was manually testing? If I was, then I was half asleep but there still wasn't an e-mail at 8:01pm (I realize that the date/time is reset on the CSV file when it's updated and it's date was as stated: 23:47).

So I'll get some sleep and check at 8pm

Great news Andrew, the csv file was created at 8pm (20:00) and the e-mail at 8:01.

So everything is working properly.

A small request is that you provide the thousands separators if set to True in Hidden settings.

Thanks, the best Beta testing experience that I've ever had .

J

Hi Praxis, thanks for the feedback. The thousand separator should be present when the relevant hidden setting is set unless you have the Volume Unit set to Byte. In this case no thousand separator is added to the report, assuming the user will want to import the file into Excel or sum it up. Adding the separator would make it harder as Excel would consider these lines strings, not numbers.

OK, I see your point, and I do have mine set to BYTE.
I'll mull this over a bit and may change to using Kibi instead.

So, thanks Andrew, I can appreciate that you're always improving Networx.

I'm surprised that no one else has jumped in for the testing, I assume that you'd like to test with different OSs, certainly 8.0 or 8.1 and maybe even 10.

Perhaps you could send some e-mails out.

I know that most folks come to the forum because they have a problem, and if there isn't any problem then they won't be here to see the Beta thread and those that might see it are only concerned with their problem.

I check daily just in case I can sometimes help with an answer, but that's just me.

My last two tests will be:
1) My computer is running but I'm disconnected from the internet at 8pm: to test if the e-mail is created as a Draft and sent the next time that I connect, and
2) My computer isn't running at 8pm: to test if the file and e-mail are created as soon as I start the computer and connect.
to see if the e-mails are created

J

Last test completed, I shut the PC down at 19:45, restarted at 02:00 the following morning (a few minutes ago) and the csv file was created and the e-mail was sent almost immediately.

I'd set Networx to use KB and the separators are there.

So I'd say this is ready for release, at least to Win7-Pro 64bit systems.

Thanks Andrew,

J

Hi Praxis, I really appreciate your thorough testing. It should work in the same way on other Windows versions as there's no platform-dependent code. I'll include this feature in the next release.

Great,
J

I've tried this and found that after the fix in the second version it works as advertised except for a minor quibble. I have opted to have a monthly email report but found that an identical report is sent every time Networx starts, which is rather a waste.

It's not supposed to be this way, it can however happen if NetWorx was unable to save its settings for some reason. If you quit NetWorx manually and start it again, it should not sent another notification until next month.

I'm afraid that's exactly what it does here.

I have fixed this in the release. Feel free to download it from the home page (the download links are at the bottom of the page).

I've just tried that and I'm afraid it's still sending a monthly report after every restart. I should say that I'm using the 64-bit portable version.

What about writing to a file? Does this type of report also execute on every start?

Yes. I've just tested it and the time of the report.htm file was updated to the current time, even though it had been written to earlier in the day.

Interesting, but I couldn't reproduce it. I guess we'll wait and see if anyone else reports similar behaviour.

I just became aware of this terrific feature as of the new release. A test email worked fine, though it was made easier by my being able to use port 25 and not needing to figure out how to light up the section requiring OpenSSL (I'm guessing that "Win32 OpenSSL v1.0.2a Light" would be enough?). My first timed event will go off tonight.

Question: I notice that it sends an attachment. Is it possible to make it not do that? It's such a short report that it seems a natural to go in-line (whether it's text or html).

Yes, if you install Win32 OpenSSL v1.0.2a Light of the correct bitness (32-bit or 64-bit) the secure email connection will become available.

As to sending the report in-line and not as an attachment, we'll probably extend it later on, also adding a way of sending a plain text report.

Quote

Andrew

Interesting, but I couldn't reproduce it. I guess we'll wait and see if anyone else reports similar behaviour.

No problem. I don't actually need these reports but couldn't resist an invitation to beta test something.

One other thought on the report, which has been working well: an additional line that shows your monthly usage so far for the given month.

A monthly report is sent on the first day of a new month, therefore it only contains records for the past month and there are no records for the new month.

Hi Andrew,

I could be wrong but I think that he meant that he'd like the month-to-date totals added to the Daily totals report assuming the e-mails are sent 'off site' without access to the Usage Report where m-t-d would easily be found..

J

Yes, I was talking about the daily report, which I should have mentioned. I wasn't thinking of off-site scenarios, though.

What I was thinking was this: anyone who enables daily email reports is probably someone who want to keep on top of bandwidth usage that way primarily (as opposed to the UI--push vs pull, we're lazy). If someone is interested in the daily figure, it's probably because they have a monthly cap, and what better way to be reminded of how much of that cap you've eaten so far that month (as far as reports are concerned) than including the running figure in each report.

HTML reports are now sent in-line and daily auto reports include a monthly total. Thanks for your comments guys, please download the new version here.

It looks great, thanks!

I don't know how many people still use Outlook anymore, but I noticed with this version that both Outlook 2010 and 2013 strip out the majority of the HTML message, leaving only a plain-text report that looks like this:

Quote

"NetWorx Reports
Daily
Computer Name"

Interestingly, Outlook did not have a problem displaying the .htm file attachment (in the previous version) once it was clicked on. Not that an attachment is a better method, but you would think that if it can handle that HTML it should be able to handle the current HTML. In the case of an HTML attachment, though, what I think it may be doing is calling the full IE rendering engine to display the attachment rather than just using Outlook's built-in renderer that deliberately ignores certain things in the name of security.

Maybe it's explained by the varying levels of CSS support? I can't recall the last time HTML emails didn't come through properly, so whatever it is, I don't think it's common. It does look fine in outlook.com, though that's expected.
https://support.sendgrid.com/hc/en-us/articles/200184928-HTML-Rendering-The-Do-s-and-Dont-s-of-Cross-Platform-Email-Design
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css