So how do we set it up. It is quite simple. Let us say we have a report that shows the internet sales orders by country as shown in the report below.

Now I want to create a publication such that the sales administrators for each of the regions get the report for their respective territories. So first I set up another report (called recipient report) which list all the users and their email addresses as shown below.

Instead of hardcoding the users I have decided to make it very parameterized by using the database and crystal reports. In a database table I maintain the contact details for each of sales administrator and the territories that they manage.

This approach allows me to change the distribution at any time without having to worry about modifying any of the reports or scheduled jobs. Now using Crystal reports I have developed the report shown above, which is what I am going to use as the input for the scheduled job.

Now comes the process of setting up the scheduled job. In CMC (or Infoview) right click on the folder where you want to save the job and create a new publication job.

Now give the job a name and also select the report that you want to send to your users.

The next step is setting up the recipients of this report. You would use Enterprise Recipients if you wanted to send the report to the users of the BusinessObjects system. However this is not mandatory. As shown below you can also email the report to other users who do not have access to your BusinessObjects server. These could be your employees or even your customers/business partners.

With Dynamic recipients I can email reports to anyone as long as the mail server information is setup correctly in my BOE system. You would need to set this up in a couple places and I will cover this in a later post. For now assuming it is setup we can use the recipient report created earlier and map the user name and emails from that report.

The next step is personalization. I want the sales administrator for Australia to only get the orders from Australia. This is setup in the personalization section of the job. In this case the report is grouped by DimGeography.EnglishCountryRegionName and I use that split the report.

As shown above I can use the country name from the report and mapping to the country name for the recipient I am instructing the job to split the report by  DimGeography.EnglishCountryRegionName and use the Recipient Mapping column to deliver to the right user.

After setting the other aspects such as format and schedule, you can go ahead and test this publication job. You can either deploy it directly or you can test it first. I would recommend testing it, whereby you can give your email address and the job would run but instead of emailing the reports to the users it would be delivered to you.

That’s all there is to setting up publications. Now coming to setting up the mail servers, there are a couple of services for which we would need to set the email servers. The easiest way to get it to work is to first use a local email server to test the functionality and then moving to the corporate mail server. You would need to setup email as a destination for the following

• Adaptive Job Server
• Destination Job Server
• Program Job Server
• Publication Job Server
• Crystal Reports Job Server

For each of the service right click and select destination as shown below

And set the details for the email server.

Click here to download the video

So how can you build something like this. It is actually quite simple as you can see in the video below.

Click here to download the video

Combining this with the live office functionality discussed in the last post should allow you to build really powerful and interactive dashboards. You can download a more complete example from here.

1. It is only available as part of BusinessObjects Edge/Enterprise (BOE). Crystal reports server (CRS) users do not have access to it.
2. Can be confusing for the end user

Live Office is a great utility that comes as part of CRS and BOE and allows embedding reports or report parts within Microsoft Office documents. It is compatible with excel, word and PPT and allows creating live refreshable documents directly within MS Office.

Click here to download video

As shown in the video above the process of creating a live document is quite straightforward. Now we know that XCelsius works with excel documents and using live office we can create a live excel documents. So putting these together we can now create a live dashboard which uses an existing crystal reports to fetch data from the database.

Click here to download video

Using this technique it becomes quite easy for end users to pickup existing reports that already contain the data needed by the dashboard and quickly create live dashboards.

To download HD videos of this post please vi

In BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1, Edge XI 3.1 and Crystal Reports Server 2008 v1, the new Interportlet Communication (IPC) feature in Dashboard Builder allows the transfer of information between distinct analytics. Now you can pass parameters from an Xcelsius dashboard to another XCelsius dashboard or to Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence. Using this framework, I will show 2 simple ways to link between:

1. Two XCelsius dashboards
2. Between an XCelsius dashboard and Web Intelligence/Crystal Reports

XCelsius to XCelsius linking

An XCelsius dashboard used as a source document has to be configured with a Portal Provider Connection. The target analytic also has to be configured with the Portal Consumer Connection. We will send parameter data between two analytics with the use of a simple example: sending information from a list box selector in one analytic to drive a chart in another dashboard. The steps are

Create the provider analytic

1. Create the list box control for the years: As you can see below I have created a simple list box control with the years.

The selected item from the list box is placed in cell B2 in my example (marked in yellow). I have also set the size of the canvas to fit the component.

2. Create a new portal data connection as shown below.

Choose provider as the Connection Type and give a name to the range (in my example Year). Since we are passing a single cell of data, select Cell  as the range type and the cell B2 which is the target of the list box selection. Also go to the usage tab and instruct the data connection to communicate with the consumers when the value in the target cell (B2) changes.

This will ensure that whenever the user makes any selection on the list box, the label will be passed to the target/consumer of the portal connection.

Create the target analytic

1. In the target dashboard I have created a simple dashboard where I have a chart combo box.

In the properties of the combo box I have set the combo to read the current selection from a cell. When the selection in the cell changes it will read the row of the data corresponding to the selected year and place it in the target row which drives the chart.

2. Define the portal data connection of type consumer as shown below.

Keep in mind that the Range name has to be the same for both the provider and the consumer. Also since the provider is going to pass a single cell I have selected the range type as Cell and have it update cell B2 which drives my drop down and chart.

Combine them in the dashboard

Now log on to InfoView and create a new Corporate Dashboard. Drag your “Provider” and “Consumer” analytics onto the dashboard. Also activate “Content Linking”.  This can be done by setting the properties of the Provider analytic. Choose the Provider analytic as the “Source Analytics”, and Consumer as the “Target Analytics” as shown below.

XCelsius to WEBI/CR linking

An XCelsius dashboard used as a source document for Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence has to be configured with the FS Command connectivity. The parameters are then assembled in an OpenDocument URL by the Dashboard Builder framework. For more information about the OpenDocument syntax, see the documentation:
http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir31/en/xi3-1_url_reporting_opendocument_en.pdf

To illustrate this example I have a summary report in XCelsius and use WEBI to show the detailed month wise breakdown.

Create the provider analytic

The steps to create the provider are the same. In fact I have used the same analytic that I used in the previous example. The only difference is that since the dashboard builder framework uses the OpenDoc URL format to pass the parameters I need to massage the parameter so that it can sent to WEBI as shown below.

In cell D2, I take the selection from B2 and use excel formula (="&lsSYear="&B2) to create the parameter for the data connection.

Now go to the data connections and add a new FS Data connection as shown below.

The trigger also has to be set in the usage tab, so that the data connection sends the new value whenever the value in the cell D2 changes.

Now export this to SWF and save it in the infoview portal.

Create the WEBI Report

The steps to create the WEBI Report is fairly simple. As shown below I have created a simple WEBI report which takes in the year as the prompt.

The only thing to keep in mind is the name of the prompt should correspond to the formula set in the provider analytic. For example in my case the open doc param formula in the provider analytics is ="&lsSYear="&B2 which corresponds to the Year prompt in WEBI.

Save WEBI report in the infoview portal and test the content linking as shown earlier.

If you want more details you can check out the user guides at

OpenDocument User Guide: http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir31/en/xi3-1_url_reporting_opendocument_en.pdf
Dashboard Builder User Guide: http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir31SP3/en/xi31_sp3_dashboard_user_en.pdf

QAAWS is a web service generator. It uses the query builder to essentially to build a query and publish the query to the platform and makes it available as a web service. Here is how you can use it.

Create the Query and Publish to the platform

1. Launch QAAWS and create a new query. Give it a name that is user friendly.

2. You can set additional parameters such as authentication mode and timeout at this stage. Usually we would keep them as default.

3. As you can see in the steps the next step is to select a universe. Based on your security setting you will be presented with a list of universes that you can use for building the query. The process of selecting the universe and building the query is the same as you would do when using WEBI.

In my example I have purposefully chosen a query which has a prompted filter. I can drive this prompt using a drop down box or other selectors from the dashboard.

As you can see my query has 1 input parameter and 4 output parameters. Now all I need to do it click on the publish button to publish the webservice to the platform.

The URL shown above is the URL for the webservice and I can use this in XCelsius to build my dashboard.

Using the Query in XCelsius

In the data connections dialog of XCelsius you can add a new live office connection. Here you need to enter the URL that we got from QAAWS.

We also need to bind the cells to both the input and output parameters. For the input parameter I have bound it to cell C3 of the spreadsheet as shown below.

The same way you need to bound the output to your spreadsheet. The only thing to keep in mind is that if your query will return multiple rows of data you would need to select a range of cells bigger than the maximum possible range as shown below.

For debugging purposes you can also get the number of rows returned by the query and bind it to a cell as shown below.

And after all of this voila you have a live dashboard…

Please note that LCM is a separate installation and requires the following Services:

1. Central Management Server: LCM job itself is an object which is saved in CMC.
2. Adaptive Processing Server: The LCM job server is added to the Adaptive processing server
3. Web Application Server: LCM is a web application
4. Input FRS : This is a server you need available after installing, as jobs that you create in LCM are saved in the Input FRS and CMS repository.

Administrative Settings

Access to the LCM application is set by managing the security for the application in CMC as shown below.

Also before creating new jobs you need to add the source and target BOE systems in the LCM application using the administration options shown below.

Creating the LCM Job

To migrate objects, you have to first have to specify which content you want to promote. This is done in LCM tool with 3 main steps:

1. Create a Job: A job is collection of objects that can be moved from one BOE environment to another.

When you create a new job you must logon to the source system and an Input FRS should be running and enabled as the Job is saved as an Object in the CMS database and as a file in the Input FRS.

In the example above I am migrating objects from my BOE environment as the source to a BIAR file.

2. Add Objects: Add the required objects from the CMS repository that should be migrated. In this example I am migrating all the reports related to the sales and finance department.

3. Add the dependent objects : Objects such as universes, connections, images and other dependencies on which the primary objects depend on also have to be added to the job. LCM will automatically compute the dependents when you click on “Manage Dependencies”.

And now all the objects and their dependents are selected in the job as shown below.

Now my job is ready for the next step which is promotion. You can promote content when deployments are connected and also when they are isolated. When deployments are connected you can directly migrate to the destination. When they are isolated you use a LCMBIAR file to transport the content.

Promoting to target

But before promoting you need to set a bunch of options.

1. Map Connections: You need to map all the universe, QWAAS URL and Crystal report database connection mappings to the target.

2. Schedule: To set how often the job should run.

3. Security: You can specify to promote the security of the objects in the job as a best practice only promote security when changes have been made, typically with a significant revision of the application.

4. Test: As the last step you can test what would happen when promoting the job, without committing the objects to destination

To promote a job you can schedule it or you can run it manually. The figure below shows the 2 scenarios of connected and isolated environments.

But before we go to Hyperlink drill down (or as I call it drill across), let us quickly cover hierarchical drill down. The screenshot below shows 2 ways to define hierarchies in the universe.

The natural hierarchies which is automatically defined by the universe is based on the order or objects within a class. For example in my universe I have Year->Qtr->Month->Date as my time hierarchy. Now if I enable drill in my report I can drill down to specific dates as shown below.

I can also define a custom hierarchy as shown in the figure 1 where I have combined the showroom and the model into a single hierarchy such that when the user drill from the showroom they can see the models in the showroom.

Now coming to drill across. For example when I click on the revenue below I want to jump to another report that shows the sales by model in that country for the selected year as shown below.

Setting that up is fairly simple. I have to create 2 reports as shown below.

The 2nd report accepts the showroom country and year as prompts. Now I have to go to the summary report i.e. Showroom by year and setup the drill across. You can setup a hyperlink drill down by right click on the cell and selecting “New Hyperlink” as shown below.

When setting up the hyperlink you would need to associate the objects from the summary report to be sent as parameters to the prompts in the detailed report as shown above.

Let us see how it works below.

In the example above I have a country table and I use it for both client and showroom country. Now if I query for showroom country i.e. countries where I have showrooms here is the query produced.

As you can see it lists all the countries in the countries table which is not what we wanted. In order to get the correct list of countries I have to join with the SHOWROOM table so that the countries list is restricted based on the SHOWROOM dimension table. This is done by specifying that whenever the Showroom Country object is used in a query, the Showroom table must also be inferred in the FROM clause of the SELECT statement. Providing that the Showroom_Country table is joined to the Showroom table the object is then guaranteed to only return countries in which showrooms exist.

Making this change ensures that we always get the correct set of countries when we query for showroom countries.

While this does not seem that critical it becomes very important especially when we want the user to select the showroom country in a prompt for example. We only want those countries to be in the prompt list where we have showrooms and making this change will ensure that we always get the correct list.

The usual join (also called as inner join) will not work in this scenario. We need what is called as an outer join. If you want to know more about outer joins you can checkout the Wikipedia link here.

To enable outer join you need to first set the ANSI92 parameter to Yes. This will change the query from the simple join to an an inner join syntax with from clause as shown below.

You can also enable the FILTER_IN_FROM parameter. This pushes the where clause of the join inside the from which reduces the number of records in the join condition and will greatly improve performance.

Now we can setup our outer join. As shown below we can setup the right outer join betwen the fact table and the showroom dimension table.

The effect of this is that all showrooms irrespective of whether they had a sale or not will be returned by the query.

So in conclusion while it is easy to setup outer joins in the universe, one should be very careful when using outer joins as it can result in a cartesian product of all rows especially when using full outer join.

In my previous posts I have covered 2 very key topics

• Period to date analysis – Examples would be YTD or MTD type of analysis which I have covered here
• Prior Period Analysis – Covered here.

In this post I will cover how to make date selections easier for users, especially in scenarios where they want to analyse the most recent period. You might ask why all of this work when I can select dates using the filter criteria in WEBI. The answer is usability. As you can see below it is much simpler to select “Current Year” or “Last Week” from the prompt selection rather than having to go through a set of dates.

So how can we design something like this. It is quite simple actually. First off I define a derived table with the set of pre-defined date ranges that I want to make available for the users.

The code for the derived table is actually quite simple. For example in my case I have used the MAX function to determine the current date based on the dates in the dimension table.

Select 1 AS ITEM_INDEX, ‘All Days’ as DATE_RANGE, min(DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MIN, max(DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MAX from DATES_TABLE
union
Select 2 AS ITEM_INDEX, ‘Today’ as DATE_RANGE, max(DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MIN, max(DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MAX from DATES_TABLE
union
Select 3 AS ITEM_INDEX, ‘Last Week’ as DATE_RANGE, dateadd(dd,-7, max(DATE)) as DATE_RANGE_MIN, max(DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MAX from DATES_TABLE
union
Select 4 AS ITEM_INDEX,’Current Month’ as DATE_RANGE, cast(CAST(datepart(yyyy,max(DATE)) as varchar(10)) + ‘-’ + CAST(datepart(mm,max(DATE)) as varchar(10)) + ‘-01′ as DATETIME) as DATE_RANGE_MIN, max(DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MAX from DATES_TABLE
union
Select 5 AS ITEM_INDEX,’Current Year’ as DATE_RANGE, cast(CAST(datepart(yyyy,max(DATE)) as varchar(10)) + ‘-01-01′ as DATETIME) as DATE_RANGE_MIN, max(DATES_TABLE.DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MAX from DATES_TABLE
union
Select 6 AS ITEM_INDEX,’Current Qtr’ as DATE_RANGE, ‘DATE_RANGE_MIN’ =
    case
        when datepart(qq,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) = 1 then cast(cast(datepart(yyyy,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) as varchar(10))+ ‘-01-01′ as datetime)
        when datepart(qq,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) = 2 then cast(cast(datepart(yyyy,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) as varchar(10))+ ‘-04-01′ as datetime)
        when datepart(qq,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) = 3 then cast(cast(datepart(yyyy,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) as varchar(10))+ ‘-07-01′ as datetime)
        When datepart(qq,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) = 4 then cast(cast(datepart(yyyy,max(DATES_TABLE.DATE)) as varchar(10))+ ‘-10-01′ as datetime)
        else cast(’1900-01-01′ as datetime)
        end,
max(DATES_TABLE.DATE) as DATE_RANGE_MAX from DATES_TABLE

This derived table has been joined to the fact table using a between clause as shown below.

I also need to define the contexts to resolve the loops created by the joins.

Now we are ready to add the "DATE_RANGE” column to the universe. In my specific example I have defined the object as a hidden object in the universe and defined a filter called DATE_RANGE with a @prompt as shown below. This is to make it easy to use. I do not want to clutter up the time hierarchy with unnecessary objects. However I want to give the flexibility to the users to easily pick a date range for their analysis.

DATE_RANGE.DATE_RANGE = case when @Prompt(‘Select Date Range for Analysis:’,'A’,'Date Range\Date Range’,mono,free) = ‘*’ then ‘All Days’ else @Prompt(‘Select Date Range for Analysis:’,'A’,'Date Range\Date Range’,mono,free) end

The prompt condition allows the user to either pick ‘*’ meaning all dates, or pick some other date range for analysis. Using the approach above ensures that during adhoc analysis the user has to drag the date range to the query filter and they will be prompted with a set of pre-defined filter conditions to restrict the data.

I have also gone ahead and defined another condition object called “Custom Date Range” that shows the calendar to the user and allows the user to pick any date range from a standard calendar. The custom date range prompts the user for a start and end date and filters the data based on the user selection.

DATES_TABLE.DATE >= @Prompt(‘Select Start date:’,'D’,'Period\Date’,Mono,free,not_persistent,{’2001/01/01′}) AND DATES_TABLE.DATE <= @Prompt(‘Select End date:’,'D’,'Period\Date’,Mono,free,not_persistent)

So in summary using some of the techniques given here as well in the other posts around time slicing, you can implement quite sophisticated and flexible time based analysis. To access the other articles in the series click on the links below.

• Period to date analysis – Examples would be YTD or MTD type of analysis which I have covered here
• Prior Period Analysis – Covered here.