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 for example, we may have thousands of customer codes. As a business user, in order to get to the customer codes I desire, I would probably want to select my customers from a certain region. Using Cascading List of Values, I can first select which regions I want to view and then select my customers from there.

Please note that it is important to think of the most efficient path a business user can take to get to their answer. One blunder that happens with many developers is the lack of planning when creating a Cascading List of Values. Some may include too many levels which in the long run increases the response time of user selection or too few levels which would cause users to spend too much time looking for certain values.

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??”.

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

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.