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.

List of Values is a powerful feature that allows users to select from a pick list when setting conditions in a query. This is especially important if you want to query on codes linked to a set of products. Using the List of Values feature, you will not need to memorize which codes go to which products.

The part that I would like to focus on is Cascading List of Values. In a real world Data warehouse for example, we may have thousands of customer codes. As a business user, in order to get to the customer codes I desire, I would probably want to select my customers from a certain region. Using Cascading List of Values, I can first select which regions I want to view and then select my customers from there.

Please note that it is important to think of the most efficient path a business user can take to get to their answer. One blunder that happens with many developers is the lack of planning when creating a Cascading List of Values. Some may include too many levels which in the long run increases the response time of user selection or too few levels which would cause users to spend too much time looking for certain values.

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??”.

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

Note: This version only works with Business Objects XIR2. If you are looking for updated instructions, please visit my new post at http://davidlai101.com/blog/2011/09/29/all-you-need-to-know-about-open-document-opendoc-part-2/