Mod Xi 2 Working With Document Business Objects Xi

Module 2 Business Objects XI Web Intelligence Working with Documents

Why The Shift To Web Intelligence

Scalability

Thinner documents

Less resource intensive

Ubiquitous usage

No software installation

We Introduce the Basic tasks of viewing documents and the underlying structure to navigate.

Working with Documents

Introduction to basic tasks

Viewing a document

Understand a document structure

Refresh data

Answer Prompts

Schedule documents

Opening a Document

InfoView Preferences determine which Web Intelligence viewer is used when you open a document and whether or not the document should open in a new browser section.

To open the document:

Locate the desired document within either a shared folder or a personal folder.

Click the name of the document.

Opening a Document Show Left Pain Table Block Pie block Report Tabs Refresh data

Show Left Pane Bar Chart Block Table Block Refresh data Status bar Report Tabs 2.1 A document in InfoView

View Modes

You can change the view mode to either draft or PDF by selecting the appropriate option from the View pull-down menu.

The status bar appears in the bottom right of the document and displays the date the document was last refreshed. If only partial results are retrieved or if there is otherwise an error in running the query, it is displayed on the status bar. To display the status bar select View > Status Bar.

A report must be converted to PDF format.

Here is how to Print a report:

Select View | PDF Mode. Your report appears in an Adobe Acrobat Reader Frame.

Click the Print icon from the toolbar.

Respond to the prompts for a printer and other settings and click OK.

Click the button “View In Html Format” on the Toolbar to return to the interactive Viewer.

Note for a quick printout that prints only the current page and does not require high quality formatting, page breaks, and so forth, use your browser’s print capability.

Printing a Report

Navigation Map

The Navigation Map displays a list of the multiple reports within a document as well as individual sections within a master/detail report. The Navigation Map appears in the left panel. Select View | Left Panel from the pull-down menu.

Jump To a Page

Use the Find button to search for text, and zoom to increase the size of the display.

Click on the Find button and the left panel and the find dialog automatically appear.

In the Find text box, enter the text or numbers you want your search to match on case or not. Then click Find Next. The matching string within the page is highlighted.

Find only searches for text within the page.

Find does not work on text within a chart.

Change your view to Draft mode to search for text through the entire document

Jump To a Page

How to Navigate to Individual Pages

How to Navigate to individual pages within a document. Web Intelligence displays just the first page number. Use the triangles on the toolbar to navigate to the next page or the last page. Once you have navigated to the last page, Web Intelligence will change the page navigation to give you a total page count.

Go to first page Go to Previous page Go to next page Go to last page For better analysis, use drill or HTML Interactive viewer.

A Document’s Structure

A documen t contains the following components:

Multiple data providers

Results in a microcube that allows drilling and slice and dice

One or more report tabs

Each report tab can contain multiple blocks

Chart

Table

Crosstab

Cell

A Document’s Structure Data Providers Web Intelligence Document 2.2 A Web Intelligence document is composed of several pieces

Components of a Report

A report is one tab within the Web Intelligence document.

To navigate to an individual report, do one of the following:

Click the report tab at the bottom of the main workspace

Open the Navigation Map ( View > Navigation Map ) and click the report name in the list.

Within a report, you have several components: sections, blocks and cells. As you try to format the report or add information to it, however, it’s important to understand which component you are altering.

Sections

Every report has a main section. Within the main section, you can have a section header and a section footer; these are different from page headers and footers that appear in printed reports. Main section headers typically hold the title of the report but also may contain a picture or logo. Reports also may have subsection if you create a Master Detail report. These sections are indicated with a bullet point inside the Navigation Map shown earlier.

Note that these sections convert to bookmarks when you view the document in Adobe Acrobat PDF for printing or for sharing documents with users who do not have a Business objects Enterprise login ID.

Sections Sections convert to PDF bookmarks

Blocks

A block is a set of data that contains

columns headings,

row headings

data values

titles for an individual table or chart,

Web Intelligence supports different types of blocks

simple table,

crosstab,

Chart

A block is one component within a section. Two blocks can be related to each other or not. For example, you can have a crosstab block of incident counts with a corresponding pie chart to visually display the incidents. Alternatively, you can have a crosstab of incidents and a trend chart of customer satisfaction, Published from a different data provider. When viewing a report in interactive mode, you can easily change the block type without launching the full-blown editor or Report panel.

Variables and Cells

A cell contains:

fixed text,

formulas, or

report variables.

Cells that contain fixed text such as a title or a picture are referred to as constants; the contents of the cell never change, no matter which data you are viewing. A cell whose contents change may be either a formula or a report variable. Report variables are pointers to the columns of data. When a report author builds a query, the author selects objects from the universe. These objects become variables in a report. There are three types of report variables that correspond directly to how the universe designer defines an object:

Variables and Cells Dimension Object

A dimension object is denoted with a blue cube and is typically textual information, but can include numbers and dates, by which you sort and analyze numeric measures.

Variables and Cells Measure Object

A measure is a number that you can analyze; it is denoted by a pink sphere or circle. “Actual start to resolve time in hours” is a measure variable.

Variables and Cells Detail Object

A detail provides additional information (attribute) about a particular dimension. You may want to see the information in a list report but will not want to use it to analyze measures by. Phone number and street address are typical detail variables. When you select a detail object its related dimension is also selected.

Refreshing a Document

As shown in the document structure, a document contains multiple components that deliver the formatted reports and analysis. When you want to retrieve new data from a data source you are sending a query to a database.

To refresh a query, select the Refresh Data button from the upper-right toolbar. With the “refresh on open” option, the document can be empty or contain data.

A document may have one or more data providers (sources).

When Web Intelligence refreshes a query, it refreshes the entire result set. As an example, Assume you have a document that shows year-to date counts by month. The data source is from a data warehouse updated on a daily basis. A report author originally ran the query last week and sent you the results. Your version of the report is therefore out of date by a week. You refresh the query. This rebuilds the entire microcube; the microcube does not incrementally add one week of data. For smaller queries, this is not important, as the results may be returned in a few seconds. Other queries, however may take a long time to execute.

The status bar in the Report window displays when a data provider was last refreshed and also displays if only partial results were returned.

While a query is refreshing, Web Intelligence displays a dialog that gives an indication of how long it should take the query to refresh. This is based on an estimate from the last query execution. If you prompt values or filter criteria changed significantly from the last refresh, this can affect the execution time, as can changes in server load at different times.

Canceling a Query

You may choose to cancel a query if you inadvertently select the wrong filters or if you decide it will take too long to refresh and you want to schedule the query. When you cancel a query using the HTML viewer, the query stops and you are presented with the last set of results. When you choose to cancel a query that you are refreshing from the Java Report panel, you have several choices of what to do with the results sent thus far.

Canceling a Query

Restore the results from the Previous data retrieval Cancel the query and keep results from the last execution.

Purge all the data from the document

Cancel the query and do not keep the results from the last execution.

Return the partial results

Depending on what phase your query was in, you may be able to return partial results. Assuming the database has finished analyzing and processing the query, it may have begun the fetch phase in which the rows of data are shipped from the database to the Web Intelligence server. If you cancel the query at this stage, the status bar in the Java Report panel will display a yellow partial viewer, no warning appears .

Canceling a Query

If the universe designer has set time limits for query execution time, you also may receive only partial results of the query. When a time limit interrupts a query before any rows have been returned, you may receive an erroneous error message, “ No Data To Fetch. Query 1 .”

This is misleading, as you receive the same error message when you construct an incorrect query, with mutually exclusive conditions.

Time Limit Interruptions

When you refresh a query, you may be asked to select additional information to ensure the correct data is returned to you. You can enter the values yourself, or in many cases, you can choose from a list of values. Choosing from a list of values ensures you have entered the possible values correctly (either uppercase or lowercase, with leading zeros or not) and therefore ensures you retrieve the desired results. Often, if you receive an error message “There is not data corresponding to this query”, it is because you have entered invalid values in a query condition.

Handling Prompts and List of Values

A list of values is a pick list generated from a query the Business Objects Enterprise server sends to the data source or in the list of values definition for predefined conditions. Because the list of values is specific to each universe, even if you have similar objects such as Product or Customer in multiple universes. You will have multiple list of values query files. Most often, these query files are initially empty and contain no values. Therefore, the first time a user accesses a particular list of values, the user may need to refresh the query associated with the pick list. Once the list of values has been refreshed and initially populated, the results are cached in a shared area on the Enterprise server. You should periodically refresh the list of values, as values in a dimension may change

In the following example, when you click refresh Data to refresh the query, you are prompted to choose a year and a status. Follow these steps to make the appropriate choice. Refresh the list of values if you do not see the your data.

Handling Prompts and List of Values 1. Values used in last refresh Enter values here 3. Click here to move a value from left to right 5. The Run Query button 2. Possible values you can choose from 4. Filter criteria for this query

When you refresh a query, the last set of prompt values selected appears by default. You can select Run Query to accept the last values used or modify the filter criteria.

The first time you access a particular list of values screen may be empty. Click Refresh Values to launch the list of values query.

For each of the prompts, select the prompt from the top of the dialog, and then select the desired values.

In the possible values list, select an additional filter criterion.

Click the >> button (label 3) to add 2008 to the right hand box.

Run query

Customized Lists of Values

For particularly long dimension list such as customers or products, you may be prompted to further narrow the desired list of values. In such a case, the universe designer has customized the list of values query to include a prompt. If the dimension object displays an ID or Code, the designer may customize the list of values to display the name or description in the list of values. For example, to find vendor names beginning with N, enter N* in the list of values search box. The asterisk (*) act as a wildcard for the list of values. Then click the binoculars icon to have the customers beginning with N appear in the list of values. The binocular drop down selects normal or case-sensitive.

Multiple Prompts

You may need to answer multiple prompts when refreshing a query. The report author should ideally sort them in a logical order, for example, the year before the quarter. By default, web Intelligence displays them in the order in which they have been added to the query. The default prompt message also gives an indication if you can select one value or multiple values. For example, “ Enter Actual Start Year ” indicates you can choose only one year, Whereas “ Enter Value(s) for reservation quarter ”, means you can select more than one quarter. Predefined conditions have IN LIST as part of their object name for one or more selectable values.

Note The Run Query button remains dimmed until all the prompts have been answered

Saving Documents

Once you have refreshed a document. You want to save the document with the new set of data. To save a document to the same place from which you opened the document, click the save button on the toolbar. To close the document, select

Document > Close menu item

or

X

in either your browser toolbar or the workspace panel.

If the Save icon does not appear on your main toolbar, you may not have permission to save the original document, particularly if it is stored in a public folder. In this case, from the view document view (not the modify view) use the Document pull-down menu and select Save As to save the document to another folder.

Saving Documents

When you save the document to a different location and name, you are making a copy of the file; no link is maintained to the original report file. In the Save As dialog, enter a document title. This will become the name of the file as it appears in the list in Info View, If you wish to enter a longer description. The description appears when you expand your document properties or display the Encyclopedia. Specify keyword if you wish to provide additional search option for locating documents. Refresh On Open will automatically force a query refresh when you open the document. By checking the box Permanent Regional formatting, you override users’ personal InfoView local settings so that formatting for dates and numeric values are stored with the document .

Saving Documents

Note If you click the box Refresh On Open there is a little point in saving the data with the document, particularly for large result sets with documents that have many pages, as the results are purged upon open.

Under Location, the folders in which you can save a document depend on the right the administrator has granted you. By default, your personal folder, Favorites is selected. To see the Public Folders, click the + to expand the list of available folders. All folders for which you have view access appear in this list, however, you may not have create or edit right that allow you to save a report to a public folder. If you do not have sufficient rights to save the document to a public folder, you will receive the following error message:

Saving Documents

Save

_______________________________________________

Saving Documents

Using

Document > Save To My Computer As

also allows you to select a different file format, including Excel, PDF, or CSV.

Excel

When you choose to save a document to Excel Format, your browser will prompt you as to whether you want to open the Excel spreadsheet immediately or you want to first download the file.

Save To My Computer AS

To download the file and specify a particular filename and path, select Save. By default, the Excel filename and Web Intelligence document name are the same. Web Intelligence will convert the document to spreadsheet format and, upon completion, will display a message “Download Complete.” Select open to open the spreadsheet.

Note that if your document contained multiple report tabs these convert to Microsoft Excel worksheets. Formatting is preserved and charts are converted to Excel charts.

Comma-Separated Values (CSV)

In some Cases, you may not want the formatting preserved but just want the raw query results exported to Excel. If so, select

Document > Save To My Computer

and either enter CSV or CSV (With Options). CSV With Options allow you to specify a different delimiter. When you save a document to CSV, all data is exported in to one spreadsheet, including those from the multiple report tabs.

If you have slow-running queries or reports that you wish to refresh on a regular basis, you can schedule them. The scheduling features are available through InfoView and for all Business Objects Enterprise document types (Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence Desktop Intelligence).

From within your list of documents in InfoView, select Schedule.

Scheduling a Document

The Schedule dialog appears on the next page.

By default, the Instance title is the same name as the document title. An instance refers to a version of a scheduled report. The administrator determines how many instances are saved. For example, you may have ten versions of a scheduled report. You can give each of your schedules a unique instance name, a useful feature particularly if you need to keep track of and instance when a report is submitted to regulatory agencies, what the CTI Drill Count Incidents status is as of a point in time, and so forth.

To schedule the report to run on a recurring bases or at a future point in time, click the drop-down next to Run Object .

Once you have selected any kind of recurrence (weekly, Monthly, and so on), the options expand. You can now select which days to refresh the query and how long the schedule is valid for. Changing the start or end date is a bit quirky, as you cannot simply enter the new date in the box displayed. You must click the calendar icon, and then click a day in the display. Even if you only want to change the year you must click a date within the calendar display. Use the single-arrow buttons ( > ) to navigate forward a month and two arrows ( >> ) to navigate forward a year.

Under Destination, you have the following options:

Scheduling the output to refresh an instance within Web Intelligence,

Send a report to another user’s Inbox within the InfoView folders,

Send a report to user’s e-mail address.

If you leave the format as Web Intelligence and the destination as Enterprise server, then you also can use the Caching Option to preload the document in HTML, Adobe PDF, or Microsoft Excel format. In this way, when you select View latest instance or a particular instance, you can very quickly toggle to access the document in either PDF or Excel format, as it has already been converted to these other formats.

Note The cache here relates to the archived or scheduled instance. It does not correspond to the last saved version of the document as it may appear in the Infoview folders.

Under Prompts, the last prompt values are used by default unless the document properties are set to Refresh on Open. You can override these values for the scheduled report

E-mail Recipients

To send a scheduled report via e-mail, under Destination, select Email Recipients form the drop-down. You can use the default settings established by the administrator by selecting Use Job Server.

Specify the following settings:

From Enter your e-mail address using the full syntax; for example [email_address] .

To Enter the Recipient’s e-mail address. The recipient does not need to be defined to the Business Objects Enterprise server

Schedule reports to be distributed via e-mail

Note There is no Drop down menu of available e-mail addresses. Business Objects technology partner APOS Systems, however, has a product Address Book Gateway that integrates with the Enterprise server to provide this capability .

Subject

Here you can enter either static text or dynamic text that is populated according to the document title, refresh time, and Business Objects Enterprise login ID. To have the subject line filled in dynamically, select the desired text from the Add Placeholder drop-down. For example, the document title will appear here as specified by the placeholder %SI_NAME%

Message

This is text to appear in the e-mail notification when the scheduled report is available. As shown, the placeholders Title (%SI_NAME%) and Date/Time the report was scheduled ( %SI_STARTTIME% ) have been inserted into the e-mail. Within the e-mail message, you can insert a hyperlink for the user to click to view the report via InfoView. To do so, select Viewer Hyperlink form the Add Placeholder drop-down that is next to the message box.

When you specify a format such as Adobe Acrobat (PDF) or Excel, then you can send the report as an attachment. If, however, your output format remains the default of Web Intelligence, then the recipient must log in to InfoView to retrieve the report, or if you have inserted the Viewer hyperlink, the recipient can click the hyperlink to go directly to the scheduled report instance.

Scheduling an object with events

When you schedule an object with events, the object will be run only when the additional condition (that is, the event) occurs. You can tell an object to wait for any, or all of the three event types:

file-based,

custom-based, and

schedule-based.

If you want a scheduled object to trigger an event, you must choose a schedule-based event.

Scheduling an object with events

Note A file-based event is triggered upon the existence of a specified file. A custom-based event is triggered manually. A schedule-based event is triggered by another object being run.

Scheduling objects based on an event

When you schedule an object that waits for a specified event, the object will run only when the event is triggered, and only when the rest of the schedule conditions are met. If the event is triggered before the start date of the object, the object will not run. If you have specified an end date for this object, and if the event is not triggered before the end date occurs, the object will not run because not all of the conditions will have been met.

Scheduling objects based on an event

Also, if you choose a weekly, monthly, or calendar schedule, the object will have a specified time frame in which it can be processed. The event must be triggered within this specified time for the object to run. For example, if you schedule a weekly report object that runs every Monday, the event must be triggered within the 24-hour period on Monday; if the event is triggered outside of the 24-hour period, then the report will not run.

Scheduling objects to trigger an event

You can also schedule an object which triggers a schedule-based event upon completion of the object being run. When the object is run, Business Objects Enterprise will trigger the specified event. For a schedule-based event, if the event is based on the instance being run successfully, for example, the event won’t be triggered if the instance fails.

Events

When Scheduling a report to refresh, you can also schedule this to be triggered by an event.

There are three event types:

When a file appears

When a schedule succeeds or fails

A custom event

By scheduling a report to run according to the status of another schedule, in XI Release 2, you can ensure that reports refresh in a particular order. This capability did not exist in the earlier Broadcast Agent.

Event-based scheduling provides you with additional control over scheduling objects. The administrator can set up events so that objects are processed only after a specified event occurs. Working with events consists of two steps: creating an event and scheduling an object with events. That is, once you create an event, you can select it as a dependency when you schedule an object. The scheduled job is then processed only when the event occurs. Events are created in the Events management area of the Central Management Console (CMC) by the administrator .

File events

When a file-based event is defined, you specify a filename that the Event Server should monitor for a particular file. When the file appears, the Event Server triggers the event. For instance, you might want to make some reports dependent upon the regular file output of other programs or scripts. File-based events wait for a particular file (the trigger) to appear before the event occurs. Before scheduling an object that waits for a file-based event to occur, the administrator must first create the file-based event in the Events management area of the CMC. Then, you can schedule the object (report and/or program objects) and select this event.

File-based events are monitored by the Event Server. When the file that you specify appears, the Event Server triggers the event. The Central Management Server (CMS) then releases any schedule requests that are dependent on the event. For instance, suppose that you want your daily reports to run after your database analysis program has finished and written its automatic log file. To do this, you specify the log file in your file-based event, and then schedule your daily reports with this event as a dependency. When the log file appears, the event is triggered and the reports are processed. House keeping: If you want an event to be triggered, the event is triggered only when the file is removed and then recreated.

Schedule events

When you define a schedule-based event, you select an object whose existing recurrence schedule will serve as the trigger for your event. In this way, schedule-based events allow you to set up contingencies or conditions between scheduled objects. For instance, you might want certain large reports to run sequentially, or you might want a particular Incident summary report to run only when a detailed Availability report runs successfully.

Scheduling a report to run upon an event requires two sets of tasks. The first involves an administrator defining an event in the Central Management Console. The second involves choosing the event to trigger and the event to wait for within InfoView.

Schedule a Refresh using the Event

You want to ensure that a second report runs only when the first one is finished. In scheduling the first report, you must tell it to trigger the event as shown.

In scheduling the second, dependent report, you must tell it to wait for the event query Completed.

Viewing Instances and Status

Once you have scheduled a document to refresh, you can see the status and history of each schedule. From within the InfoView document list, select History. If you want to delete a particular instance, check the desired box and click the Delete button .

Logging Off

After a certain period of inactivity, your InfoView session may time out. For security reasons, though, it is best to log out when you are finished working with business Objects XI. If your InfoView preferences have each document open in a separate browser window, first close these additional windows. Then from the InfoView Header panel, select Log Off, the yellow padlock button

Logging Off

Note If your InfoView session times out or if you log out of InfoView before closing your documents, you will receive the following error message from within the document browser:

Summary

This Module covered the basics of viewing a document and the document’s components. A Web Intelligence document is much more than a report; it can contain multiple data sources and multiple report blocks to convey information from multiple perspectives. A document is a snapshot of the data. As data is updated, you will need to refresh your document. For reports based on continually changing data you may wish to schedule your documents to refresh on a periodic basis. The next module highlights the more powerful capabilities of interacting within a document to analyze your data.