I am often asked why I still participate so much on BOB after all of these years. The main reason is I still get inspired by questions that make me think a little bit. The puzzle for today’s post was presented as a question something like this:
How can I display each individual value selected in the UserResponse() function on its own row in a table?
I believe the reason for wanting this behavior is fairly clear. If you have a bunch of complex data it would be much easier for the report consumer to read this:
XYZ123ABC
DEF456HIJ
BOB111BOB
Instead of this:
XYZ123ABC;DEF456HIJ;BOB111BOB
As is often the case, the strict answer to the question is “you can’t do it that way” with Web Intelligence. Despite the “you can’t…” answer I am going to show how it can be done.
Continue reading “Displaying UserResponse() Values On Separate Rows”
I got an exciting email earlier… it seems that I have been invited to attend (and present at) the second annual Mastering Business Objects conference in Australia. In my opinion, the conference last year was an excellent event (and I’m not just saying that because I got to go.) I tend to prefer smaller gatherings like user groups or smaller conferences because I get to meet and interact with a lot more people. Oh, and I got to go surfing. 🙂
This year the event will move a bit south to Melbourne. Here are the specific details as recently published:
Mastering Business Objects
May 31 2010 – June 2 2010
Grand Hyatt, Melbourne, Australia
I will post more details as they become available.
It’s funny because just this evening I was talking to Daniel (my 3rd grader) and he wanted to know (as he was petting one of our family cats) if any cats were poisonous. I told him that as far as I knew, there was only one poisonous mammal, the platypus. Which is native to… Australia. 🙂 After a quick visit to Wikipedia I know now that there are a variety of shrews that are also poisonous, but I felt good about the fact that I at least remembered the platypus.
Reporting tools are designed to report. Seems simple, doesn’t it? But sometimes they need to do more in order to meet the requirements. For example, a frequent question on BOB (in fact it’s in the Reporter FAQ) goes like this:
I have only six months of data, but I have to show all twelve months in my report. How can I show the missing data?
The trick is to understand that Business Objects does not make up data. It just doesn’t have that capability. And you can’t edit the report directly in order to add those extra values to the result set. However, there are a couple of tricks that I can share that will help solve this issue. Continue reading “Making Up Data Part I: Personal Data Providers”
In the first post in this series I talked about different places I could place complex calculations. I reviewed some pros and cons of doing calculations during ETL, in the universe, or on a report. In this post I am going to focus only on report calculations. I will cover the formulas versus variables debate and show a couple of tricks to make working with variables a little bit easier along the way.
This presentation covers slides 10 through 12 from my 2009 GBN presentation titled “Return of the Variables” which can be downloaded from my conference page. Continue reading “Constants, Formulas, and Variables, Oh My!”
