David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

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...

How to Drilldown from a Chart in Design Studio

A chart component allows for visualization of data. The data is bounded to the chart by referencing a data source alias. Any component that is able to filter the data source will also change the chart accordingly. Ultimately, users would be able to change the data displayed moving from one level of detail to the next. However, with Design Studio, it can also allow for user interaction within the same...

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...

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards vs SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

After working with both SAP Business Objects Dashboards and SAP Design Studio, and seeing the pros/cons of each tool, I’d like to give my 2 cents on both tools since many people are wondering what the difference is between the 2 tools. (more…)

Getting BI Web Services to work in WEBI Richclient through https

Recently I had a client who switched from http to https; and although it seemed like a simple transition in some places, it was tricky in others such as WEBI Richclient. With WEBI Richclient, we noticed that we could no longer publish or view our BI Web Services as the BI Web Services area was just hanging. One workaround would be to just give up and work through WEBI in BI Launchpad, however if the...

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...