David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog » Design Practices

Using Filtered Rows instead of VLOOKUP

David Lai — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 01:50:03 +0000

This article talks about using the filtered rows technique instead of a VLOOKUP.
Not until Xcelsius 2008 came out, were we able to filter on multiple rows of data that matched 1 entry. So in order to accomplish this we would either have to use VLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH. Using this technique was very cumbersome and although filtered rows has been available for a while, I have been on a couple engagements where I still see VLOOKUPS in the excel spreadsheet!

Thus hopefully writing this article will get the practice of using filtered rows ingrained in the
Xcelsius Developers minds.

I’ve created a video below that shows 2 scenarios below using VLOOKUP and filtered rows. I’ve shown how much easier it is to use filtered rows and how much easier it is in the future to maintain.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnk3J2QXbVI

I’ve also attached the source files from the 2 examples so you may do your own comparisons.

You may download the source files here

Xcelsius Canvas Container

David Lai — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:44:08 +0000

In this article I’ve attached a video that talks about the new Canvas Container feature in Xcelsius 2008 SP3.
I found that the Canvas container is very easy to use and provides the same functionality as the group method but allows the flexibility of moving objects in and out of the canvas very easily.

I totally recommend that Xcelsius developers use the Canvas container method to group objects instead of the old grouping method.

I am curious of the canvas container performance and if it is buggy as I have not experienced any problems yet, so please feel free to comment with your experiences.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBxNOM7PrUM

Xcelsius 2008 Refresh on Load

David Lai — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:31:51 +0000

One of the major issues I’ve encountered with Xcelsius 2008 was refreshing too many Live Office components on load from the Data Manager. This would cause the browser to crash when loading the swf.

I’m not sure if it’s a bug but a workaround I discovered was to use a Reporting Services Button to perform the refresh on load. You can find the button in the Web Connectivity components category.

When dealing with a lot of live office objects here are some simple rules to follow.

1. Only use the Refresh on Load from the Data Manager to refresh cells that contain data for objects such as dropdown selectors.

2. Chart data for example that needs to be refreshed on load should be done through the Reporting Services Button

I’ve also attached a Whitepaper from Business Objects that talks about the Refresh on Load from Xcelsius 2008.

Download White Paper

In short, when refreshing on load from the data manager, data is refreshed while the objects are rendering which may cause an overload on the flash player. Whereas refresh on load from the Reporting Services button will occur after all the components have been rendered.