Tag: SAP Analytics

SAP Business Objects Delegated Administration

Posted on by EV Technologies

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

Posted on by EV Technologies

While working on a new space I began getting the following error:

SAP Business Objects Explorer Request timed out


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?

Prompted Table Names in Designer

Posted on by EV Technologies

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

Posted on by EV Technologies

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

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.

Building a Successful Business Objects Team

Posted on by EV Technologies

First off, thanks for tuning in to the first of hopefully a long list of meaningful and helpful blogs published by EV Technologies. Each week we are going to strive to publish a new article aimed at the use of some facet of the suite of Business Objects tools.

So…here we go!

A few years ago I responded to a forum post on BOB, which asked how to estimate the size of a Business Objects support team. That was over three years ago. I was actually asked this question again here recently and I thought it’d be a good idea to revisit this topic.