[Vtigercrm-developers] Issues with Scheduled Reports & getReturnPath()

[Alan Lord]

I've spent most of the day looking at a problem with a customer not 
getting Scheduled Reports from vtiger 5.4.0.

The new function introduced in 5.4.0 getReturnPath() (bottom of 
CommonUtils) is a *REALLY* bad idea. (I thought I'd already fixed it 
once in modules/Emails/mail.php - see 
https://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?f=139&t=53251)

Our customers frequently use their ISP to relay their emails. Setting 
the Return Path of the outbound emails from vtiger to 
"noreply at my-isp.com" triggers some spam prevention and stops emails 
getting sent by the relay.

This getReturnPath() function is being called in three separate email 
sending code paths (cron/send_mail.php, modules/Emails/mail.php, 
vtlib/Vtiger/Mailer.php) and is a pig to fix properly. Please make this 
a priority for 6.0.0. I do not want to have to hack code all over vtiger 
just so we can send emails!

Today has been very frustrating. It is very hard to debug external, 
authenticated SMTP connections on remote servers. Please can you try not 
to break this functionality so badly next time...

With specific regards to the Scheduled Reports functionality I have two 
further observations:

1. On sending, there is no "from address" added to the email if the 
Outgoing Server's from address not configured. (This will also cause 
some SMTP servers to not send the email). The offending code is in 
modules/Reports/ScheduledReoports.php. In vtiger_reports, every report 
has an "owner" id and in my opinion the "from email" should be taken 
from there initially and if it is empty, use the SMTP from field, if 
that fails, make something up that is useful like "vtiger at hostname.domain".

2. Scheduled reports are a PITA to test: If you edit a scheduled report 
and change the time on a daily report. It doesn't update the 
next_trigger_time row so the report will not run again until whatever 
the last settings were... This means the easiest way to test is to have 
a SQL query lined up like:

UPDATE `vtiger_scheduled_reports` SET `next_trigger_time` = '2012-06-15 
15:43:00' WHERE `vtiger_scheduled_reports`.`reportid` = 24;

And then set the scheduler and cron job to run every minute! It would be 
really helpful to add a tool of some kind to make it easier to test a 
scheduled anything (report, workflow etc...).



Al