David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

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...

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...

Custom BW hierachy level selection in WEBI

Connecting to BW using a BICS connection in WEBI is pretty cool, but unfortunately the ability to select a desired level from a hierarchy proves to be very difficult without any tricks. A common request that I’ve been finding from clients these days is the ability to select a desired level in a hierarchy and not have to expand all the way through in order to see that level. (more…)

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...

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...

All you need to know about opendoc

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...

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...