Tag: Crystal Reports

Auditing SAP Dashboards in BI4

Posted on by EV Technologies

If you have been following me in the community enough you know I’m a system statistics nerd. I love Auditor. I wrote Sherlock with my buddies because I love system statistics. And, with the release of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 (BI4), we have new stuff to audit!

Working with a customer rolling out SAP BusinessObjects for the first time, we (shockingly) were experiencing performance nightmares with SAP Dashboards. You don’t want dashboards that load in more than a handful of seconds. Many of you may scoff that this is impossible, but I’ll argue any day that a dashboard shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load. Yet, this is not the purpose of this post. Let’s talk about auditing dashboards.

Automated Email Alerts with Crystal Reports

Posted on by EV Technologies

Quite some time ago, I wrote a blog about using Crystal Reports Alerts to get automated notifications in the event something significant happened in your data. I was recently working on a similar challenge, but when that encompassed not only bursting to specific users in this manner, but also giving them their own alert and target via email AND formatted for their mobile devices, I had to cook up something different. Crystal Reports + Publications + Profiles + Bursting + Alerts = a handy solution with only a little set up overhead. Fun! But not for the faint of heart.

Troubleshooting Long Running Reports

Posted on by EV Technologies

I caught a tweetstream the other day that Diversified Semantic Layer’s friend and past guest, Michael Welter, had a question on diagnosing and solving for long running queries in Web Intelligence (Webi)…at least I think it was Webi. I saw it fly by and really wanted to weigh in, but it got away from me. I did not necessarily see answers to Michael’s question in that time frame, so I wanted to take some things that occurred to me and that I use in my debugging process.

I may be overly sensitive to this topic, now that I think of it. My first employer had a very very large data warehouse (at the time, largest in the world every other month). While full of rich data, it was painfully slow and as a result BusinessObjects was the perceived as slow by the business. Let’s work on that. I’m going to keep this post within the confines of Webi. There may be similar settings and techniques that can apply to Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Explorer, etc. (even Deski…sorry Jamie).

Crystal Reports to XML

Posted on by EV Technologies

2010-08-08 Corrected Formulas below

This will be the first part of a series of blogs that illistrates how to flow data from Excel to Xcelsius using Crystal Reports and XML.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has had export support from Crystal Reports for quite a while. While the Export to XML option allows for specification of a transform file (XSL/XSLT), another handy export option I value is Export to Text. I’ll get back to that in a second.

Using Crystal Reports For Automated Alerts

Posted on by EV Technologies

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.

Ranking in Crystal Reports 2008

Posted on by EV Technologies

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.