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??”.

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 take in order to plan your content.

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/

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 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.