David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

BEx Query greyed out in Web Intelligence

A common problem when trying to access a BEx Query from Web Intelligence is that we cannot! I want to build a query off the sales test query, however it is greyed out. Well here’s an easy fix. All you need to do is open the query up in BEx Query Designer, go to the Query menu and select Properties Click on the Extended tab and then make sure By OLE DB for OLAP is checked under Allow External...

Cascading Prompts in BOBJ Dashboards and WEBI

A cascading prompt, helps the user focus on values they want to include in the prompt without the need to go through every possible value. A great example comes from a list of cities around the world. Imagine if we had to go through a huge dropdown list every time in order to find our desired city. It would be much easier if we can first select a country, then province/state and then the city. This...

Scheduling jobs based on trigger events

Being able to schedule a job based on a trigger event is a very important feature in SAP BusinessObjects. For example, let’s say we have a report that is refreshed daily based on data updated by a daily ETL process. We only want the report to be refreshed if the ETL process completes successfully. There are 2 ways of creating a trigger event. You can either create a file trigger, where the ETL...

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...

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...

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...

Demystifying LCM Overrides

The LCM Overrides tool is very powerful as it allows administrators to manage the migration of server host settings from environment to environment very easily. For example if Dev used a different database vs QA, it would be a hassle to manually change the connection setting every time a universe was migrated.  Well with LCM Overrides, we can automatically have QA attach to different database settings...