A common request that I have seen with my clients, is the ability to enter comments into a dashboard and then view those comments when they re-open the dashboard in the future.

Unfortunately Xcelsius does not have a native mechanism to send data back to the database, as a dashboard’s main purpose to read data and not write back to the database.  However, I do see the value in being able to persist comments so that we can go back later and be able to look at documentation on why certain things happened, etc.

In this article I will give step by step instructions on how to use web services and Xcelsius to accomplish the task of inserting comments.  However you will have to write your own web service code

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on BI Web Services at SAP Inside Track Vancouver 2011!

A replay of the presentation can be found at the following link => http://bit.ly/rkBU1p

I’ve also attached the powerpoint presentation that you can download here

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately on how to setup opendocument (opendoc), so I’d like to post this tutorial on how to do so which works for Business Objects XI 3.1.

Unfortunately my previous tutorial at http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/11/04/all-you-need-to-know-about-opendoc/ only works with Business Objects XI R2

Please note that the tutorial was taken from SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook so if you are interested in more useful Xcelsius recipes, be sure to purchase a copy

If you only need the Excel Template for setting up OpenDocument calls, you can download it here

If you are interested in getting detailed information on OpenDocument Parameters please download the official SAP OpenDocument documentation here

Otherwise continue reading for the Tutorial

I’ve had several comments on my “Xcelsius Dynamic Color Binding” post regarding issues where their dynamic colors were not changing.

Well I did a quick test and yes there is a bug! So I wanted to warn everyone including SAP about this new bug.

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 where I still see VLOOKUPS in the excel spreadsheet!

Thus hopefully writing this article will get the practice of using filtered rows ingrained in the
Xcelsius Developers minds.

I’ve created a video below that shows 2 scenarios below using VLOOKUP and filtered rows. I’ve shown how much easier it is to use filtered rows and how much easier it is in the future to maintain.

I’ve also attached the source files from the 2 examples so you may do your own comparisons.

You may download the source files here