In the first post on designing universe prompts I talked about the idea of having a default date value present in a prompt. In case you don’t want to read the entire post, here is the executive summary:
You can’t do it, sorry.
At the end of that post I mentioned something called a “magic date” that I frequently use in my universes to get past this limitation. That’s my subject for today.
Problem Definition
I have a date prompt in my universe. I would like to be able to provide a default value of today’s date. This would allow my users to click-n-go on the report without having to update the date value each time. It is also essential for scheduled reports, which is something I didn’t really touch on last time. When I schedule a report, I have to provide values for every prompt. I have a long series of posts on how to create some dynamic date objects that can be used for scheduling, but those were not prompts.
In a nutshell: I need a way to accept a prompt value and convert it to today’s date for user convenience and for scheduling. Can I make that happen?
Continue reading “Using a “Magic Date” Value in Prompts”
I have seen this question come up frequently on BOB lately. And if the question keeps coming up, it becomes an easy idea for a blog post. That way, once I document a concept or a solution I have somewhere consistent to link to. The short answer to the question, unfortunately, is no. But let’s investigate and explain a bit further than that, shall we?
Continue reading “How Can I Make “Today” My Default Prompt Value?”
There has been quite a bit of speculation on BOB about what the future holds for the annual conference. As many readers will know, I have been a very active participant in the conference for more than a decade. I attended my first conference in 1995 and delivered my first presentation in 1996. I have been honored to have been selected as a presenter every year since.
But that was then, what about now?
Continue reading “What’s Happening to the Annual Conference?”
I apologize for deviating from my normal content, but I had to share this. Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly) is going to release a new musical… online! If you are a Buffy fan and remember the musical number (from season 4, I think) then you have to see this. It looks great… they have Neil Patrick Harris as the mad scientist, and Nathon Fillion as the superhero.
The teaser goes something like this:
For every day… there is a night.
For every world… there is an underworld
And for every hero… there is…. this guy?
This should be great! 😆
Some time back I answered a question on BOB that asked:
How can I copy a context?
There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this. In a semi-complex universe you might have a bunch of snowflake tables and a series of fact tables. After building the first context, the second (third, fourth…) are essentially the same but with a different fact table. As far as I know there is no way to copy / paste a context, but there is a fairly simple way to source a new context from an existing one. Here’s what I do: Continue reading “How To Copy a Context”
The final speech has been spoken, the final demo has been given, and the final beer has been consumed. (What do you expect, the conference is in Germany… 😛 ) The beer was consumed by someone other than me (I don’t drink beer) but I sure enjoyed the company anyway. One of the things that I have found both this year and last is that with the smaller conference people are much more available. Obviously the full SAPPHIRE conference is very large (up around 9,000 people I was told) but the Business Objects portion of it remains smaller than the American Insight conferences. That means I get to talk to many more people that are both interesting and interested in what I might have to offer. Today was a great day for that. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – It’s Over”
I had an opportunity to meet the head of ASUG at lunch today. It was a good lunch (I’ve already posted about the food 🙂 ) as we got a chance to discuss some of the initial feedback on BOB regarding how user groups are going to be managed under SAP. I posted a few notes about it here already. In a nutshell there are some potentially exciting things that will be coming in the next year or two for the regional user groups. But of course that’s not all that’s going on today. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 2”
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Wednesday has dawned (bright and early, thanks to Alan Mayer who I am sharing a hotel room with 😛 ) and so I am able to post some thoughts before the day gets along too far. I watched only a portion of the general session this morning so I don’t really have any comments on it. The first track session that I plan to attend is on the text analysis tool that Business Objects purchased last year. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s essentially a tool that allows you to scan unstructured data like blog posts or forum topics 🙂 looking for information. One of the standard demonstrations shows how this tool can let you scan hundreds or thousands of emails that come into your customer service department and get an overall “feel” for the sentiment of those communications. It’s an interesting idea.
While I have time, some general thoughts and ramblings about the conference experience… Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 1”
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I called this “Part Only” since I didn’t get to do a “part 1” today like I did yesterday. My presentation was this morning so I took the extra time this morning to complete my preparations for that, and then Alan Mayer (another Integra presenter) had his presentation this afternoon. As a result I have not managed to get to too many other presentations. I just got finished watching Tim Nightingale present on the benefits of migrating to XI 3.0, and there are some interesting new features that he called out as specific benefits. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 2 – Part Only”
This is my second post of the day from Berlin, Germany, where I am attending the SAPPHIRE conference. This is the first merged conference since SAP acquired Business Objects, and it has been interesting to see what is the same… as well as what’s different. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 1 Part 2 (Wrap-up)”
