Dynamic Visibility with SAP Design Studio

One of the features that made me fall in love with Xcelsius (Dashboards) back in the day was the ability to easily show and hide components based on selections made in other components.  Later on Xcelsius introduced the ‘Tabs’ component in 2008 and made life even easier for showing multiple components dynamically.  However, I still […]

Complex Calculations Made Simpler with Web Intelligence

There are many hidden talents within Web Intelligence that can assist with massaging your data and bringing out relationships within your numbers without ever having to export your data outside to another tool, such as Microsoft Excel. One of those underutilized functions is PREVIOUS(). It simply returns the previous value of an object.   While Web […]

The Day that Derby Died

Bye, bye Ms. American Pie… and all that jazz. Chalk one up in the win column! One of the smaller bullets in the “What’s New” document for SAP BI4.1 Support Pack 03’s release was the removal of the Apache Derby database usage by the Promotion Management app within the BI Platform. I railed about Derby […]

Struggling to Manage SAP BI4 Version Management

SAP BI4 version management is one of those things that some of us have been dreaming about for a very long time. I remember many moons ago spending several hours a week cutting .biar files and checking them into a version management system for development teams. Clunky but effective. BI4 Version management has the promise […]

Web Intelligence Hack: Updating the color palette for a single report

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 allows you to define a custom corporate color palette for use with Web Intelligence charts. To begin, modify …\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\images\VisualizationConfig.template.xml then save it as VisualizationConfig.xml in the images folder and restart the web application server (Apache Tomcat, et. al.) so the changes take effect. <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <CONFIG> <!– Rename this […]