Hitting a Moving Target
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so I can’t imagine why…
With apologies to the rock group Chicago, but I could not help starting out this post with a quote from one of their most famous hit records. Yeah, I have records. Deal with it. 😛
I am going to start out this post with a very obvious statement. There are two ways to get reports: Interactive and Scheduled. Interactive reports can have prompts that allow me to specify which values I want to see, and many times those prompts will include dates or date ranges. Since they are interactive I can change the dates each time I run the report.
But what about scheduled reports? I would hardly want to schedule a report that always ran for August 22, 2007, right? I want that date parameter value to change. Maybe I want the report to always run for “yesterday” or “last week” or “the second Tuesday of the month” or anything along those lines. The challenge is, of course, that the value for “yesterday” changes each day I run the report. How do I hit that moving target?
Continue reading “Dynamic Dates Part I: Yesterday and Today”
The Evils of Automatic Software Updates
A few months ago about half of the reporting team at my current client called me at various times over a week saying they were having problems running reports. Eventually I figured it out… they all had one thing in common: automatic Java updates. Turns out that was a Very Bad Thing™ to do. 🙂
Continue reading “Java 1.6 / 6.0 Update Issue”
I have added a new option on the right sidebar menu today: Recent Comments. I have been quite pleased with the initial participation, and I do hope that my random musings will provide some education or perhaps even some entertainment along the way… and I hope that some of you (not spammers, no, stay away! 😀 ) might be inspired to leave a comment or two.
From time to time.
In any case, now if you just want to see the recent comments the last five are listed for you in reverse chronological order. Only approved comments will be on the list.
Designer is one of my favorite parts of the Business Objects product suite. I enjoy creating universes and solving the challenges that occur during that process. If you have worked with Designer yourself then you probably know that there are several different types of challenges that occur fairly frequently… so frequently, in fact, that we have names for them. They are Chasm Traps and Fan Traps. I plan to describe each of those traps in this post. I will provide various different solutions (some standard, some not so much) for each in future blog posts.
Continue reading “Designer SQL Traps”
The Challenge
In a previous post I showed a way to create the illusion of an alerter on a chart using the full client product. In this post I will reuse the same technique with a slight twist so that it works in Web Intelligence as well. If you have not already read Part I please do so first so you will be familiar with the basic steps for this technique.
Here is a summary of the steps that I used to solve this in Business Objects:
- Create two versions of the chart: one green and one red
- Create a variable that shows the trend of the data
- Use the Hide Block feature of Business Objects to keep one of the charts from being displayed
- Position both charts in exactly the same space, providing the illusion that the chart is changing colors based on the data
This is all fine… but Web Intelligence does not have the “hide block” feature. So how do I solve this issue?
Continue reading “Alerters On Charts Part II”
2007 Business Objects Insight Conference
Yesterday I got acceptance notices for two of my abstracts for the Business Objects conference in Orlando. If anyone is counting (I am 😉 ) this will be the twelfth conference in a row that I have been privileged to present. This year I will be presenting one topic on Designer (more details later) and another called “Return of the Variables” which I hope will be fun.
Edited August 30
The “variables” presentation has been dropped, and instead I will be doing a two-part presentation on Designer.
The Challenge
Officially there is no way to put an alerter on a chart. Yet some time back I was challenged by a client to create a line chart that was green if the overall trend was up, and red if the overall trend was down. This chart appeared in a sectioned report so there was a different chart for each section value. Possible? It turns out that there was an answer that works. With minor changes it works in both the desktop and the web products as well.
The eFashion database and universe are used in this demonstration.
Continue reading “Alerters on Charts: Part I”
If you have been to the Integra Solutions web site and looked at their presentations page, or if you have been to one of the many Business Objects conferences that I have presented at over the years, you may have seen one of my “Variables” presentations. The very first one was in 1997 at the conference in New Orleans. And believe it or not, it was the presentation that almost wasn’t. 🙂
Continue reading “Variables and More Variables”
The Challenge
It is not uncommon for a report writer to want to know how many items were selected from a prompt. The challenge is that there really isn’t a way to do that, at least not one that is available as a function. So this article will show an interesting way to solve that challenge. It is not my original idea; it came from a post on BOB. At the moment I cannot find the post in order to give credit to the original author.
In a nutshell what is required is as follows:
- Capture the user’s response to the prompt
- Count the number of semi-colon characters found in that string
Continue reading “How many values were picked from a list?”
I already have a couple of blogs. Why start another one? Well, it is just so darned easy. 😀 And I believe that by having separate blogs for separate reasons it becomes easier to build an audience. So if you are here you have probably followed a link from the collective known as BOB and you’re looking for stuff related to Business Objects. If so, you’ve found the right place.
I plan to post technical tips and podcasts that are related primarily to working with universe design and building reports, as that’s where my primary interest is.
So whoever you are, and wherever you have arrived from, welcome. 😎
— Dave Rathbun
