Bryan has a project that needs some advanced computing and data manipulation. The client is on the data 2 server. They want a report generated every night and saved as a PDF (mini report of sorts). They then want that PDF auto sent as an email attachment to a specific person. By themselves, all of those things are possible. Our model gets a little bit more complicated due to the different servers. The server that sends the email doesn't have access to the data that is needed. The server that does have the data has to communicate through an API socket connection to the email server. Bryan and I went over some options and did some light drawings of what we could do.

The easiest way would be to send an auto email with a link that has a date range or specific day coded into the link. Then the user would get the report as soon as they click the link. Basically, generate the report on demand or just in time. If we start physically creating files, you deal with storage, eventual clean-up, and then transferring files from place to place in order to email or send as an attachment. We talked about converting the physical file into a base64 (code subset protocol) and then sending to the other server. We could also use FTP (file transfer protocol) to send the file to the other server. It may be a series of smaller requests to prep and make sure that other steps have been performed and are ready to go. Anyways, it gets kinda complicated due to how the email server is setup as compared to all of the individual data servers.

Bryan had a good attitude and enjoys learning some of the deeper and/or more complicated options and workarounds.