A common request that I have seen with my clients, is the ability to enter comments into a dashboard and then view those comments when they re-open the dashboard in the future.

Unfortunately Xcelsius does not have a native mechanism to send data back to the database, as a dashboard’s main purpose to read data and not write back to the database.  However, I do see the value in being able to persist comments so that we can go back later and be able to look at documentation on why certain things happened, etc.

In this article I will give step by step instructions on how to use web services and Xcelsius to accomplish the task of inserting comments.  However you will have to write your own web service code

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Bursting Reports in Business Objects
The difference here is that instead of distributing the reports to Business Objects users, we’ll be able to dynamically control our user list that we will distribute our reports to externally.

Dynamic Recipients are often used with Crystal Reports that are not connected to a Universe and do not have BOBJ users associated with the reports.

In our example we will create a publication using the webi report from the previous post and distribute it to a dynamic recipient list.  Our list will contain a list of stores and their associated state and email.  They will receive an email containing the pdf report filtered according to their state.

The ability to publish and schedule reports according to one’s profile is an important feature that we have in Business Objects.  For example, if I am a plant manager for a the West Region and want to receive a daily report on work quality, it would be very beneficial if I can receive a report in my inbox daily that only contains results for the West Region.  This would save me the hassle of manually running a report each day and manually entering in my parameters, which is cumbersome.

In this tutorial, we will walk through step by step on how to schedule and burst a Web Intelligence report as well as creating user/group profiles.

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on BI Web Services at SAP Inside Track Vancouver 2011!

A replay of the presentation can be found at the following link => http://bit.ly/rkBU1p

I’ve also attached the powerpoint presentation that you can download here

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately on how to setup opendocument (opendoc), so I’d like to post this tutorial on how to do so which works for Business Objects XI 3.1.

Unfortunately my previous tutorial at http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/11/04/all-you-need-to-know-about-opendoc/ only works with Business Objects XI R2

Please note that the tutorial was taken from SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook so if you are interested in more useful Xcelsius recipes, be sure to purchase a copy

If you only need the Excel Template for setting up OpenDocument calls, you can download it here

If you are interested in getting detailed information on OpenDocument Parameters please download the official SAP OpenDocument documentation here

Otherwise continue reading for the Tutorial