Email Address list is empty for Spotfire Automation Services 'Send Email' task

Products	Versions
Spotfire Automation Services	7.5 and higher

Description

In Automation Services Job Builder > Send Email Task, there is an option to select email addresses from the company directory. But this Select option is only available if there is an LDAP directory configured.

On clicking the Select option, the Email address list remains empty after display name search operation or only a few email addresses show up after search operation as shown below:

The email address list does not depend on the SMTP Host configuration. Instead it depends on the default/specified search expression in Administration Manager > Preferences > Automation Services > Send Email which is run against your directory server, as defined by the 'LDAP server URL' mentioned in the Spotfire Server configuration excluding contexts, group filters etc:

Resolution

The default search expression to find the users in Send Email task of Spotfire Automation Services Job Builder considers expression is:

 (&(objectCategory=person)(displayname=*{0}*)(homemdb=*) (!(userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2)))

where {0} is replaced by the text entered by the user, and must not be removed. These expressions are LDAP search filters.

So if user name is not appearing in search results, check in an LDAP browser tool like Softerra LDAP Browser (see related KB article) whether those user names have homeMDB and objectCategory attributes setup and visible because if any of the two attributes are missing for those users then their email addresses would not appear.

If the username does not have a homeMDB attribute, the search expression can be altered like below where users member of either of specific groups are only considered. “|” is used for OR condition between member groups. For example:

 (&(objectCategory=person)(displayname=*{0}*)(|(memberOf=CN=Spotfire1,OU=Support,DC=tibco,DC=com)(memberOf=CN=Spotfire2,OU=Distribution Groups,DC=tibco,DC=com)))

If all users present in that company needs to be considered, search expression like below can be used. For example:

 (&(objectCategory=person)(displayname=*{0}*)(company=TIBCO))

More examples for creating LDAP search filters are provided in References.

Once the search expression is created, follow below steps in Spotfire Analyst:

Login to Spotfire Analyst client with Spotfire Admin privilege
Go to Tools > Administration Manager
Select Preference tab
Select 'Everyone' group (or desired group)
In the right hand side pane, select: Automation Services > Send Email > SearchExpression
Here enter the customized search expression that allows user to search the LDAP
After this, close the TIBCO Spotfire Analyst client and open it again to ensure the changes made are active
Now you can search for users by their displayname in Send Email task.

Note: When searching user with display name, you can use complete display name of the user present in the external directory ("Mary") or a substring of the beginning letters ("Ma").