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.

Step 1:

Let’s re-use the report that we created in the previous post

Step 2:

Now let’s create our dynamic recipient list as a new Web Intelligence document.

Note: I’ve created a dummy email address object in the Universe, but in your case you would use a real email address according to whomever the report will be distributed to.

In our report we will select Store Name, State and Email Address.

Great! Now you’ve created your dynamic recipient list whom you’ll be distributing reports based on their state to.

Step 3:

Let’s proceed to create our publication.
In this post we will only go through what is needed for Dynamic Recipients so if you want detailed instructions on how to create a publication, please visit my previous post on bursting reports in Business Objects.

Instead of setting up the Enterprise Recipients list, we will setup the Dynamic Recipients list instead.
The Store Name object will be mapped to the Recipient Identifier and Full Name fields.  The Email object will be mapped to the Email field.

Make sure Use entire list is checked.  We can uncheck it, if you want to manually select which stores in the dynamic recipient list to include
and exclude, but in this example we want to keep it totally dynamic.

Note: If we wanted, we can also send to Enterprise Recipients but in this example we only want to distribute to the dynamic recipients.

In the Personalization category, go to Local Profiles and select State from the Report Field.  On the Dynamic Recipient dropdown, select State.

In the Format category, select Adobe Acrobat as the Output Format

In the Destinations category, select Email.

The To: field will need to be the email address variable that we set in the Dynamic Recipients section.  To select the Email address variable, just click on the Add placeholder dropdown and select Email Address.  Fill out the From:, Subject:, and Message: sections appropriately.

Save and Close your publication.

Step 4:

Schedule your publication to run now and verify that the reports have been distributed to each user correctly.

In our example we can see that we generated a report for each state that will be distributed to each store on the dynamic recipient list.

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.

Part 1

Let’s create a simple cross-tabbed report using the eFashion Universe

As you can see we use the months as columns, the states as rows and Sales Revenue as the measure.
In addition we will insert a Year Query prompt.  I wanted to pop in the Year prompt to highlight 2 very important points that you must be aware of.

1. On our profiles, we can only filter based on selected dimensions.  Remember that you cannot create a profile parameter based on a query prompt. Many people forget this and wonder why their profile parameter isn’t working.  When we reach the profile creation step I’ll remind you again.
2. Unfortunately, scheduled reports cannot insert dynamic values into the query prompt.  Hopefully SAP reads this so they can fulfill this long awaited enhancement, since many people I know complain about this limitation.  There are ways to work around this issue but is out of our current scope.

Part 2

This stage involves setting up the profiles that we will use in our publication.
Basically what we want to accomplish here is the following:

2 groups:
US West Sales Team -> filters report on Western States
US East Sales Team -> filters report on Eastern States

3 Users:
Users will be inside either US West or US East and will filter again depending on what months they should be able to see.
Month1-6East
Month7-12East
Month1-12West

I’ve already setup the users and groups in this example so if you want more information on setting up user/group rights and content management please read the following posts:
Understanding Business Objects Access Levels
Content Management planning in Business Objects Enterprise

First let’s create a State profile that filters on your state object.

In the CMS, go to the profiles section and click on the Create new profile button.  Name the profile “State Profile”

Right click on your newly created profile,
Select Profile Targets
Click the Add… button
Select the appropriate Efashion Universe and the State object

Now we will create the 2 region groups.
First click on Profile Values and then click on the Add… button

Next click on the Choose button beside the User/Group to select the appropriate user group

On the Group selection screen, select “US East Sales Team”, press the “>” button.  Then press the “OK” button.

We can now add all the Eastern States.  To do this, type the State name and press the Add button, one at a time until you have the list of all Eastern States built. When you are finished, press the OK button.

Then we need to build the US West Sales Team.  Click on the Add button and follow the same steps as what we did for the US East Sales Team group.  When we are finished adding the US West Sales Team Profile values, it should look like the image below.

Next create a Month profile and set it up the same way as the State profile.

Create your Profile Target and add the 3 users and setup the Profile values appropriately

At the end, the Profile Targets and Profile Values for the Month Profile should look like the following screenshots.

 Part 3

The following section involves setting up the publication.
You can either create a publication in CMS or Infoview.  In this example we’ll create it in the CMS.

First we’ll navigate to the folder where I’m going to create the publication. It’s best practice to come up with a organized publication structure if you have many different types of publications.

Right click on the folder where you want to create the publication. Select New -> Publication

Name your publication

Select the WEBI that we created in Step 1 as the Source Document

For the Enterprise Recipients we want to add the US West and US East groups
Select the 2 groups and then press the > button

We can skip the Dynamic Recipients section as this is used mainly for Crystal Reports, which will be covered in a future post.

On the Personalization section we want to add the profiles that we created in Step 2 as part of the Global Profiles.

Note: We don’t use Local Profiles here, however if we do want to use Local Profiles, you can setup a profile that only has Profile Values and no Profile Target, and use
those values here instead.

Also Note: Important reminder that profiles can only filter on dimensions existing in the report and not the Year query filter prompt that we created!

In the Format section we can select the type of format we want to distribute the report in.  In our example we will distribute the report to our users in PDF format.

There are a variety of destinations that we can burst the report to.  The most popular options are Business Objects Inbox and Email.  In our example we will burst to the Business Objects Inbox.

Now we can setup the scheduling portion by going to the Additional Options section.

On the Prompts section we will select 2004 for the Year.  Remember that this can only be a static value unfortunately.

Next we will set our report to burst daily at 6am.

The last 3 items we will skip, so just click Save & Close.
Note: From the advanced section I will be writing a post on Profile Resolution in a later post.

Now instead of waiting until 6am next morning, right click on the publication and select Run Now.

Note: You’ll notice there’s an option to Subscribe and Unsubscribe from publications.  I’ll be covering the subscribe and unsubscribe conceps in a later post.

Verify that each user has the correct bursted report by going to each users’ inbox through the CMC as the Administrator.

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.

Here is an example on creating a cascading list of values. Let’s use a universe that contains markets inside regions and create a cascading list on markets. At the end of the day we will want to select our markets that belong to a set of regions that we drilldown from. Note that I have used markets instead of customers because it’s easier to display on the webi pic.

First we will need to go into the “edit properties” tab of the market object object. From there click on the edit button.

A query panel will come up with the market object on the Result Objects window. On the conditions window, drag and drop the “Region” object and choose the “in list” option so that we can choose from a list of Regions.

After running the query, it is important to have the Hierarchical View checked in the edit properties tab. The reason is that this view is much more user intuitive than the tabular view when selecting from the prompts. You can test this out to see for yourself.

Once you have become comfortable with creating cascading list of values, you will be able to present business users with user intuitive selections that will increase productivity and reduce response time.

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??”.

Looking at the eFashion Universe (note that this is a modified version of the efashion universe), we see that there are 2 fact tables that join to 2 of the same dimension tables. If we do not set a context for each of the fact tables in the universe, we will only get 1 query when building a report that involves measures from both fact tables.

SELECT
Article_lookup.Article_id,
Shop_facts.Amount_sold
FROM
Article_lookup,
Shop_facts,
product_promotion_facts,
Calendar_year_lookup
WHERE
( product_promotion_facts.Week_id=Calendar_year_lookup.Week_id )
AND ( Article_lookup.Article_id=Shop_facts.Article_id )
AND ( Article_lookup.Article_id=product_promotion_facts.Article_id )
AND ( Shop_facts.Week_id=Calendar_year_lookup.Week_id )

Since the promotion fact table and shop fact table are joined in the same query, we will only get results that are in both the promotion fact and shop fact table. In reality we want all available products even if they are not on promotion. The products that are not on promotion will fall down the bottomless pit and report designers will be wondering where they have gone.

Fan Traps

Fan traps are another common problem and occur when a measure is overstated. So using the same example above, the promotion cost measure is a “sum of promotion costs”. Let’s say for one product we might have 5 entries in the shop fact table and 2 entries in the promotion fact table. Instead of a one-to-many join for the promotion fact table, we now have a many-to-many join which will cause a cartesian product. The promotion cost for that product will be 5 times higher than what its supposed to be since we have 5 entries in the shop fact table.

Prevention
To prevent falling into these traps, we must properly set our contexts in the universe. Here we set a context for both the promotion fact and shop fact. As a rule of thumb we should always set contexts for facts.

Setting contexts for these 2 facts will now produce 2 queries that will be synchronized thus returning the correct results because now we have 2 seperate joins instead of 2 joins in the same table.

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/

Let’s take an example where we have the following dimensions (year, quarter, product) and measure (revenue).

We can easily build a table to represent the sales revenue for each product in that quarter and year.

Now what if we wanted to display the sales revenue in a different context. For example we might want to display the highest quarter’s revenue each year.

You can add an aggregate row that happens after each year and retreive the highest quarter’s revenue from there.

But what if we want our values combined with the first table? This is where context calculation is important.

To accomplish this we need to take into account 3 points
calculation – maximum revenue
input context – year, quarter
output context – year

The combination of input and output contexts tells web intelligence to sum the revenue for each year/quarter and then output the maximum value for each year.

The formula to accomplish this is as follows “calculation(input context) output context” => Max([Revenue] In ([Year];[Quarter])) In ([Year])

The result will come out as the following

Finally we can insert the formula into the last column of the first table and instead of having 2 tables we can have everything on 1 table.