Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

We are using the OpenDocument() function to “drill” from one document to another. In order to make report maintenance easier I have created some objects in the universe that contain the proper syntax for the URL required to access this function, as well as one that contains the report path. This way even if we change our folder names or structure I can change the universe and do not have to update every report on the project. This has worked very well for us.

Until my current project.

On this project the primary distribution channel was PDF sent via email. Our users said that the links were not working. And of course every time I tested by logging in to Infoview the links worked just fine. After further investigation by another team member, it seems that our Report Path (in the format [Folder],[Sub Folder] was being truncated at the comma. As a result, the OpenDocument() function was looking for the reports in [Folder] and ignoring the full path. That was a bit of a problem.

As mentioned, our Report Path is stored as an object in the universe. To avoid extra work on each report I had encoded the space in “Sub Folder” as Sub%20Folder when I created the object. Without this encoding the URL would not function as required. The other characters such as [ and ] and the , between the folder names were all presented as-is with no encoding. For one project that distributed and viewed their files purely through Infoview this worked great. But the URL was being truncated when sent to PDF. One small difference was that our folder structure for this project used _ instead of a space in the folder names, but it was all working in Infoview, so it must be okay, right?

Wrong. But it wasn’t the _ that was the problem.

Initially we thought that there was a problem with the PDF generation and investigated that path. However, the solution was ultimately discovered by Brian Durning. It seems that while Infoview was okay with a compound path [Folder],[Sub_Folder] for Adobe the comma had to be encoded in order to work. If not, the comma was taken as part of the data and Adobe stopped looking for additional path information at that point.

I updated the Report Path object from this:

'[Folder],[Sub_Folder]'

to this:

'[Folder]%2C[Sub%5FFolder]'

As an aside, these objects do not parse since they are just text strings. %2C is the hexidecimal code for a comma and %5F is the code for the _ character. Once this fix was in place all of our Adobe links worked. And if you are curious, our Infoview links continued to work just fine.