Moving from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence
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Optional Prompts with Default Values in Designer
Updated 4/12/2010 – I feel like a blockhead. I went to reference my own blog and found a copy and paste issue in my formula below. It’s fixed (I hope). Sorry!
Truth be told, today I felt like a total rookie. I got a requirement that screamed “don’t dare duplicate that report just so you can have a version to schedule and version to run on demand”. The requirement was to run a Web Intelligence report monthly through the job server (always running for the prior month when executed) but to also allow the user to open, refresh, and be prompted for a list of values. I spent a few minutes tinkering with some SQL that ultimately lead me to a simple pre-defined condition for my reports. I’m certain this has been blogged and forum posted to death by now, but I’m going to throw it out there for fun.
Using Crystal Reports For Automated Alerts
Have you ever been asked to automate the identification of errors in data? As an administrator, what if you could automatically identify reports in the SAP Business Objects CMS that exceeded 100 MB in size or users with more than 15 instances of any given report? What about from a reporting integrity perspective…it would be fantastic to identify reports with orphaned objects before a user encountered an error.
Using the inherent capabilities in SAP Business Objects Enterprise, organizations utilizing Crystal Reports can easily take advantage of Alerters to automate these types of questions. This capability, coupled with the rich metadata provided by the Sherlock suite of products, creates an awesome tool for admins to get proactive about monitoring the platform.
SAP Business Objects Delegated Administration
I actually kind of dig the security model with XI. Call me crazy. I do believe it is more than a few steps up from the days of 6.5 and older. I know it has its shortcomings but it is getting better.
One challenge I’ve dealt with a few times is delegated administration. The goal is in putting user administration in a corporate information security group’s hands rather than a Business Objects Admin’s hands. This makes perfect sense in a deployment that didn’t necessarily start on a Windows AD or LDAP deployment or relies heavily Enterprise groups for access control.
Business Objects Explorer – Request Timed Out
While working on a new space I began getting the following error:
Interesting… This is a new space. A quick search over BOB, the SMP, and as a last resort, Google, did not yield any results. So, I turned my attention back to the universe. Shame on me, I neglected to run an Integrity Check in Designer before I got started with my new space. There was a single object that did not parse correctly causing Explorer to throw this error.
Call me crazy, but I’m just thinking that if Explorer is using Web Intelligence for its access to the semantic layer, why could it not move the error messaging up from that?
Make Live Office Docs for Xcelsius Invisible
Use SAP BusinessObjects security settings to make Live Office Docs for dashboards invisible
Defining a BI Branding Strategy
Some vision on ways to improve user experience and consistency in your BI application
Prompted Table Names in Designer
I was faced with a problem where normalization of a table was somewhat impractical due to the sheer size of the data. It was perceived that any indexing strategy, coupled with the size of the data and physical infrastructure, would hurt query performance. The decision was made by the modelers to leave a dimension off of the table and create a table for each unique value for the dimension. This created a challenge in that satisfying the requirements would require potentially hundreds of tables to be added to the universe. The solution: use the @prompt syntax to enable the user to choose the appropriate table to segment report data with. This will ensure that before the query is run, the table needed is selected.
Universe Derived Table as a Lookup Table
I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve been asked to create a reporting solution before the data, or even the tables, are 100% completed. One trivial issue encountered may be missing reference data in lookups. There’s an inexpensive option to help move the development lifecycle along.
Ranking in Crystal Reports 2008
I was working with a client recently when I had to create a rank within Crystal Reports 2008 on the result set using a universe based query. There are obvious solutions in applying a rank in a query. I do like, that in Web Intelligence, that there are built in functions to apply a database rank. Based on my brief research on this with Crystal Reports, I found there is no real rank function. I then set out on my own to see if I could come up with another way.
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