A Board Procedure is a sequence of Actions, allowing to perform a broad range of tasks, for example maintenance tasks such as updating a Board database, extracting or printing data, invoking an external program, or tasks that process data, from the simple calculation of some new cubes, to complex allocation procedures required in business models such as Budgeting planning and forecasting, profitability models and simulations in general.
The elementary steps of Procedures are called actions. An action can run a Data Reader protocol, run a calculation on an InfoCube (called a DataFlow ), print reports or broadcast reports via e-mail, extract some etc. Some actions can require a user interaction, for example prompt the user to make a selection and other actions can run unattended.
Board Procedures can be saved in a Capsule or in a Database. A Procedure saved in a database can only act on that same database; by being centrally saved in the database it can be invoked from different Capsules. A Procedure saved in a Capsule can act on more than one database, it can be invoked only from a screen of that Capsule.
A Procedure can be
interactively launched by a user (clicking on a button of a Capsule)
triggered automatically when a certain screen is opened or closed
executed as a batch process, launched from a command line or by a scheduler.
Refer to Scheduling Capsule procedures and Opening a Capsule from command line.