photo credit: eshm

13.2
You agree that during the course of this contract and after the termination of the contract for whatever reason without limit in point in time you will keep in confidence and shall not disclose to any person unless authorised to do so with the prior written consent of the Company the following:-
13.2.1 Any consultancy know-how, methods, tools, techniques or intellectual capital.

I realised that some of my blog entries or tweets could fall foul of this clause so I asked for written permission to continue blogging generic “work related” content such as Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Modelling and Business Objects.
Rather than granting this and leveraging the fairly good google rankings that my posts seem to get I was asked to remove all work related posts.
Business Objects Best Practice (higher ranking than BusinessObjects.com)
Business Objects New Features (Page One)
Dimensional Modelling (Ralph Kimball ?)
As such I have password protected all of my work related posts.
If you are struggling to find content there are a variety of searches that could turn up interesting content.
Alternatively you can go to my company site, contact details can be found here or here.

Twitter

I have invested a lot of content to Twitter this year.
This is primarily due to the convenience of the platform racking up almost 1200 updates in the year here.

Flickr / Photography

I can’t find a way to get stats for the year so here are my top five photos:

Web Site / Blog

By far the most popular post on the site was the photos page here.
Second most popular page is the “About Me” page here.
As for the blog entries themselves they rank at:
1 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Conditional Prompts
2 – Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component
3 – Modelling Change In Your Dimensions
4 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking
5 – Dimensional Modelling – Facts
As you can see here the site only really started getting traffic last January so that gives me 17300 page views.

Personal Stuff

Obviously the biggest news of the year was the passing of my daughter Emma.
Celebrating the Life of Emma Berry Goodman
And the year ends on another low point with the passing of another member of my extended family.
George Miller – Footballer | 1939 – 2008

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I know that I covered this in my video post, but I hated the quality of the video, so here is a similar post with pictures (click on hem to see larger versions).

You no longer need to splash out on fancy dashboarding software (although Xcelsius is good !) to quickly highlight when your data is changing. A new feature in Business Objects Web Intelligence (WebI) 3.0 allows you to add this feature to any document.

Query

How do you set up your query to be able to track the changes in your data?

You don’t have to do anything, just create your query as you normally would.

Edit Report

This is where the magic happens! First of all you have to enable the track changes feature which is in the top right hand corner of the Edit Report window.

This gives you your first choice: Do you want to track changes between each refresh of your document or do you want to track changes from a fixed set of data?

For this demo I’m going to select Auto Update so that I can see the changes between each refresh. In order for track changes to work you need to have two datasets, so I’m going to select the “Refresh Now” option and select the year 2005.

As you can see my 2004 section has been struck through and the 2005 section has been shown in blue. This is because I completely changed my dataset. If I remove the year section and redo the change tracking you will see how track changes works better when you give some thought to your document design.

Now we can see, highlighted in green, all the values that have increased, highlighted in red the values that have decreased, and struck through and values that no longer exist. At a glance I am not worrying as on the whole I am selling more product that last year.

If you lose track of what you are comparing, it is listed at the bottom of the screen:

As you can see, this confirms the type of change tracking and the two refresh dates that are being compared. What I am not sure of is how to confirm the parameters that were used in each case.

If I then refresh the report again, this time for 2006:

Here we can see that we have (re)introduced some product lines and these are highlighted in blue.

I need to print this report out and the red and green are unreadable on my cheap black and white printer, what can I do? There is a “Hide Changes” button, the middle of these three:

Clicking this hides the highlighting of the changed data. The data it’s self is still kept.

Clicking the button again will re-display the colour highlights. Compare this with clicking the leftmost button “Deactivate Data Tracking”, this discards the “previous” version of the data and disables the highlighting facility.

The rightmost button; “Data Tracking Options” gives you access to change the formatting of the data changes. You may need to do this as increased values may not always be good (Green).

From this same window you can use the “Reference Data” tab to change back to a fixed data set for your baseline comparison if you wish.

This is obviously no replacement for a fully featured dashboarding product such as Xcelsius but it is “easier” to use than the Alerting feature that we are used to use within reports.

I’m going to start a small series of posts showing you what’s new in Business Objects XI 3.0

I’m starting off small; with Conditional Prompts.

The Problem

Just to clarify. A conditional prompt is a question that is placed in the query that allows you to fine tune the results that you return from your database. The problem is; sometimes you want to see “some” of the data, other times you want to see it all. This is fine if you are a report developer as you can edit the query to add or remove the prompt. If you are a report consumer then you are stuck with the query as it has been developed.

When you use a prompt object it will ask you “Enter value(s) for Year:” for example and then allow you to select one or more years. If you want to see all years, then you have to select every value from the list. This is fine for years as there are not so many of them. When you have “lots” of values this becomes a pain to select, you might miss one, your query becomes “ugly” as it has all of the selected values embedded within the SQL and some databases actually put a limit on the number of values that you can pass in this manner.

The “Old” Solution

Using versions prior to XI 3.0 the way that you got around this problem was to manually edit your condition objects. Rather than having a “simple” condition:

Dates.Year in @Prompt('Enter value(s) for Year:')

You would manually edit this to become:

(Dates.Year in @Prompt('Enter value(s) for Year:')
or
'All' = @Prompt('Enter value(s) for Year:'))

This works because if the user types in ‘All’ then ‘All’ = ‘All’ would be true for every row, so you get all of your data.

The problem with this method is that the user has to type in ‘All’, most users prefer to use a list of values (LoV) to select the values you want. You then have to manually edit the SQL that populates the LoV values to be something along the lines of:

select distinct year from dates union select 'All' from dual;

Again, this works but is more manual editing. This then has to be done on every object that you think that you will need this feature on.

The XI 3.0 Way

As of XI 3.0 there is a much more elegant (less labour intensive) way to do the same thing.

When you are building your query and you create a query filter you will see a new option denoted by the question mark icon to the right of the prompt text.

(by clicking on any of these images you will see a larger version)

Clicking this icon opens the prompt properties dialog box.

Here I have ticked the “Optional prompt” box to tell XI that I may not always want to supply values.

When I now refresh my query it asks me for the values I wish to associate with the prompt. Note the new text “(optional) If no value is selected, this filter will be removed.”

For the moment I’m going to select a single year, 2004.

When I run my report, you can see that only a single years data has been returned as requested. I have altered my report to also display the SQL used and notice how there is a “where” clause to restrict the year to a single value.

If I now re run the report but do NOT supply a year:

The report runs and shows me all years:

However, notice that this time there is no where clause to restrict the data.

Summary

Whilst this may not be the most earth shattering piece of new functionality, it is on that I think will speed up the report development process as it removes a lot of the simple but mundane tasks that a Designer had to do. It also results in much more efficient queries being sent to the database so the users should get their results just a little bit faster.

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