Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Those three little words: “Working as designed.” I hate them.

I don’t know why it took me so long to experience this, as I found this topic on BOB that brought the issue to light years ago. That being said, here’s what’s going on…

In Universe Designer (UDT) a designer can change the state of an object from visible to hidden without impacting a report. I use this technique to create objects that have a specific purpose but keep them out of general circulation. For example, I will often create a class called “Report Objects” that contains objects with special exception handling or a unique purpose. That class is visible in the development environment only, which means my report developers have access to this class. Before the universe is migrated to the QA (and production) environments that entire class is hidden.

This allows me to create report-specific objects without risking an ad-hoc report using one of them incorrectly. It’s a great technique.

A secondary reason why I use the “hide” option is to retire old objects. I don’t want to break reports, but I don’t want any new reports to be created with these objects. Hiding them means existing reports continue to work.

In Information Design Tool neither of these strategies will work. Once an object is hidden, any report that includes that object fails. 👿 Based on information from SAP, that’s the expected behavior. They acknowledge that it’s a change in behavior, but so far I have not found the reason for the change. The bottom line is that it’s “working as designed” and will not be fixed.

Keep this in mind when you consider converting your UNV universes to UNX, as if you’re using the hidden object trick for any of the reasons I outlined above (or others that I may not have considered) that technique will fail in IDT.