Using Filtered Rows instead of VLOOKUP

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...

July 2nd, 2010 by David Lai 

Understanding Business Objects Inheritance

When setting up user and group rules, it is important to understand inheritance and how inheritance works.  Otherwise you may run into unexpected access rights for your groups and users. Global to object level hierarchy By default, groups and users will inherit rights from the highest level. The highest level starts at the Global Settings level.  The second level is the folder level; and finally...

February 20th, 2010 by David Lai 

Understanding Business Objects Access Levels

Understanding the Business Objects security model will enable you to map out a content management strategy for your organization.  Visit my previous post at http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/11/06/content-management-planning-in-business/ after understanding user access levels and inheritance to setup your content. In this article we’ll go through the Business Objects Enterprise Access Levels. There...

February 19th, 2010 by David Lai 

Cascading List of Values

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...

January 8th, 2009 by David Lai 

Best Practices for Organizing and Naming Objects

While working with many Universes, I’ve noticed that sometimes not enough attention is given to naming objects and the ordering of objects. This in turn may cause confusion with the business users since they are not completely clear on what each of the objects do. Ordering of objects When you have objects of the same class grouped together, it makes it much clearer to the business user to view...

December 4th, 2008 by David Lai 

Preventing Chasm and Fan Traps!

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...

November 18th, 2008 by David Lai 

Content Management planning in Business Objects Enterprise

Proper content management planning is a critical element in the design process of a Business Objects enterprise system, unfortunately because of tight deadlines and lack of experience, many times there is not enough time spent here and users are left with a system that’s unorganized and tough to maintain. I have experienced this first hand so I would like to write about some simple measures to...

November 6th, 2008 by David Lai 

Importance of Web Intelligence Contexts

With calculation contexts in web intelligence we are able to generate powerful reports quick and easily. 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...

October 16th, 2008 by David Lai 

Xcelsius 2008 Refresh on Load

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...

October 9th, 2008 by David Lai