While working with many Universes, I’ve noticed that sometimes not enough attention is given to naming objects and the ordering of objects. This in turn may cause confusion with the business users since they are not completely clear on what each of the objects do.

Ordering of objects

When you have objects of the same class grouped together, it makes it much clearer to the business user to view when they see it in a hierarchal form instead of alphabetically. Lets take for example date objects. We have a year, quarter, month, and day object. The largest increment or grouping should always appear at the top and the most detailed at the bottom. Having this ordering will facilitate drilldowns. If these were sorted alphabetically, a business user would have to do more work in order to come up with a drilldown hierarchy.

In this article I would like to talk about Chasm traps and Fan traps. These are problems that we often experience while building universes and reports. When encountering these traps, one may wonder what is going on? How come my sum statements arent adding up correctly? Or why am I missing some rows? A properly designed universe will help avoid these problems. In addition, a good understanding about measures and contexts from report designers will help as well.

Chasm Traps

Let’s talk about Chasm traps first. In short, a Chasm trap can be imagined as a bottomless pit where some rows may unknowingly fall in and never come back out. So when viewing a report caught in a Chasm trap, one may ask “Hey where did Record X go??”.

Proper content management planning is a critical element in the design process of a Business Objects enterprise system, unfortunately because of tight deadlines and lack of experience, many times there is not enough time spent here and users are left with a system that’s unorganized and tough to maintain.

I have experienced this first hand so I would like to write about some simple measures to take in order to plan your content.

I’ve seen quite alot of postings in the Business Objects forum on calling the opendoc function from either a web intelligence report or Xcelsius dashboard.

You can download the pdf instructions on all the opendoc parameters here opendoc detailed instructions

I’ve also provided instructions on drilling down to a Web Intelligence document from Xcelsius here

And an Xcelsius open doc worksheet template that you can use here

One of the very powerful new additions to Xcelsius 2008 is the ability to create scorecards easily. If we wanted to create scorecards in Xcelsius 4.5 we would need to manually insert trending icons into each row in order to create a scorecard.

In Xcelsius 2008 however we can use a label based menu with alerts. The alerts will act as the trending icons and from there we only need one object to show our indicators.

Here are some simple instructions to create a scorecard.