David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

CurrentDate() not what you think in Web Intelligence

In Web Intelligence there are a variety of helpful date functions that you can use. 2 in particular are CurrentDate() and CurrentTime(). You would think that CurrentDate() returns just the current date and CurrentTime() returns the current datetime. However both return the exact same result which makes it confusing, especially if you are using date dimensions where the time is stripped off. The funny...

Web Intelligence – Unable to insert comment

The ability to add commentary to web intelligence reports is a powerful new feature released in SAP BusinessObjects 4.2. However, it does not work straight out of the box. Here are some steps to get comments to work. (more…)

Scheduling jobs based on trigger events

Being able to schedule a job based on a trigger event is a very important feature in SAP BusinessObjects. For example, let’s say we have a report that is refreshed daily based on data updated by a daily ETL process. We only want the report to be refreshed if the ETL process completes successfully. There are 2 ways of creating a trigger event. You can either create a file trigger, where the ETL...

Setting up SAP BusinessObjects single sign-on based on WinAD logins.

Single sign-on (SSO) is an important feature that I highly recommend all organizations to setup in their SAP BusinessObjects implementations. It allows users to move between services securely and uninterrupted without specifying their credentials each time. SSO effectively joins these individual services into portals and removes the service boundaries – switching from one application to the...

Importance of Apply to Subobject in User Security

As a user security best practice in SAP BusinessObjects, it is best to start with no access and then slowly grant access to the groups whom require access.  Otherwise we will end up having to explicitly remove access for every group that should not have access, which is really a pain in the ***. As you know when you add a new user, that user is added to the Everyone group by default. Before providing...

Setting the correct CMS name for BI Launchpad and CMC login page

In SAP Business Objects 4.0+, a properly distributed environment will have the Web application server and the Server Intelligence Agent (SIA) sitting in separate servers.  By default, when you install the web application portion of SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, it will set the default CMS machine with the same hostname that the web application has been installed. Unfortunately when a user opens...

Fixing Corrupt LCM Overrides

Here is a quick reference that you can use if any of your LCM overrides do not work anymore. Unfortunately LCM was not designed very well. Another bad design by SAP where I’m baffled by what the designers were thinking! One of the most common reasons why this would happen is if someone changes something on the source LCM override. For example if you were to change a source connection, you may...

Web Intelligence – Input Control that affects all tabs

One of the major limitations in Web Intelligence is the ability to use 1 input control to control filter selection for “All” tabs. For example, if I had 5 tabs and wanted to have a country input control that is applied to all 5 tabs, I would need to create a separate input control for each tab. In addition, if users want to filter on a particular country during runtime, they must REMEMBER...

Creating proper WEBI BEX hierarchy prompts

In this article I’d like to present how to properly create a hierarchical selection prompt in WEBI. The most natural way to create WEBI selection prompts is to create the selection prompt directly on WEBI. Unfortunately whoever designed the WEBI hierarchical selection prompt did not put proper thought into it. Let’s first go through the incorrect way of creating a WEBI hierarchy prompt and...