After installing Windows 7 the add on manager is greyed out in Xcelsius.
This is due to the default User Account Control settings. Change the setting to the lowest level (9) and then import the add ons. After restart of Xcelsius you can change the level back up again (or leave it).
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Thanks to everyone who attended the Reportapalooza “Behind the Reports” webinar yesterday! Below is a quick recap of where we are with the Reportapalooza competition. The final winner will be announced on Nov 22th.
Challenge #1 (Done) – Winner , Mico Yuk (Check out my Coffee Consumption Calculator)Challenge #2 (Done) – Winner, Mico Yuk (based on traffic sent to Report a Hero Page)Challenge #3 (Done) – Winner, Brian Durning (voted best Crystal Reports Video by Community)Challenge #4 (Done) – Winner, David Deitch (voted best Charity Dashboard by Community) Challenge #5 (In Progress) – “Reporting Remix” (What this series of blog post is about).Community Dashboard Challenge (In Progress) – Voting end tomorrow Nov 12th for your favorite community dashboard.Experts Webinar- ”Behind the Reports” (Recording should be available soon) – You don’t want to miss the important tips and answered questions by the experts!Now for a quick recap of the last 2 posts:
Part 1 – I went over some Q&A on what it would take on a high level to embed your Xcelsius charts and maps into a Crystal Report, as well as some pros and cons of both.Part 2 – I went over how to set up your map in Xcelsius so that it can be consumed by Crystal Reports. I used Google Maps (compliments of Centigon Solutions) for this example as it much more robust than the out box maps in Xcelsius.Part 3 (the last one) – I am going to show you the step-by-step process on how to embed your Xcelsius .swf file into your Crystal Reports.6 Simple Steps to embed your Xcelsius .swf file into your Crystal Report!
1. Open Crystal Reports 2008 -> Click on blue icon to Embed Flash file
2. The Google Map should appear in your dashboard
3. Right click on the Google Map -> Click ‘Flash Data Expert’ to bind the Crystal Report Data
4. Drag the Label field, in this case ‘Sheet1_.Label’ into the 2nd row in the ‘Insert Row Labels’ section
5. Drag the Address field, in this case ‘Lat,Long’ into the 1st row in the ‘Insert Row Labels’ section -> Select ‘OK’. (Note: The map is now connected, so you can see the heat map data display in the preview.)
6. Voila! Your data and your map now appears in your Crystal Report.
As a BONUS, I attached the files that I used for the series. Click here to download.
Again, just a quick reminder to cast your final votes by tomorrow (11/12) on the 3 dashboards that were submitted by the community to show your support.
Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page
Tags: Business Objects, BusinessObjects, Centigon Solutions, Reportapalooza, SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, Xcelsius 2008
InfoSol will be a Diamond Sponsor at the 2010 ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference to be held in Orlando. Florida October 5-7. The conference is expected to draw an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 BusinessObjects users.
InfoSol will be leading two session tracks during the conference : one highlighting Xcelsius Customer Case Studies and the other highlighting the next generation of BI report and dashboard publishing. We have also been invited to participate as one of the selected Xcelsius Guru companies in an Xcelsius Gurus event at the conference.
InfoSol will be highlighting many of its value add solutions including InfoBurst and 360View. Several InfoSol partners are also sponsoring and exhibiting including Mellmo the developers of Roambi and Antivia the developers of XWIS.
Be sure to stop by the InfoSol booth (#404) to say hello and enter for our raffle to win an iPad.
Normally queries like this are not really solved in T-SQL; rather a front end UI like WebI is capable of navigating through the records.
However if you intend doing it in T-SQL, then here’s how we can retrieve the Next and Previous Records of a given record:
/* Create Sample Table */
DECLARE @TT table
(
ProductID int,
ModifiedDate datetime,
CategoryGroupName varchar(10)
)
/* Create Sample Data */
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 101, ’2010-10-01', ‘AA’)
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 203, ’2010-10-01', ‘AA’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 305, ’2010-10-01', ‘AA’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 101, ’2010-10-02', ‘BB’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 203, ’2010-10-03', ‘BB’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 634, ’2010-10-03', ‘BB’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 101, ’2010-10-04', ‘CC’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 203, ’2010-10-04', ‘CC’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 305, ’2010-10-04', ‘CC’);
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ( 634, ’2010-10-04', ‘CC’);
SELECT
Prod2.ProductID,
Prod2.ModifiedDate,
(SELECT MAX(ModifiedDate)
FROM @TT Prod1
WHERE Prod1.ModifiedDate < Prod2.ModifiedDate and Prod1.ProductID=Prod2.ProductID ) as PreviousModifiedDate,
(SELECT MIN(ModifiedDate)
FROM @TT Prod1
WHERE Prod1.ModifiedDate > Prod2.ModifiedDate and Prod1.ProductID=Prod2.ProductID) as NextModifiedDate
FROM @TT Prod2
GROUP BY Prod2.ProductID, Prod2.ModifiedDate
ORDER BY 1,2
Result looks like:
One of the questions that came up in the forums the other day was how to display multiple KPI’s for a set of years using the accordion menu. It was further complicated by the fact that some of the KPI’s were absolute figures such as sales and the other KPI’s were percentages such as growth rate.
Seemed like a good problem to solve and I had some free time today, so thought if tackling this. The dashboard looks like follows
What is cool about this is Y axis reflects the nature of the KPI. For sales and Inventory it will show in $’s and for others the axis shows % values. There is a little trick that I used for and I will share it in a later part of this document.
Let us start with the basics. In order to build an accordion style dashboard we need the data in a particular format. The screenshot of the excel file I started out with is below.
For each year I am capturing the trend for the KPI’s. I could have arranged the excel the other way around as well and it would have still worked. Once I have the data I just need to drag and drop the accordion menu and the graph from the pallete and I can be off and running.
For the accordion menu the settings are simple enough. See below
And I also bind each of the years with the category as the source data.
Essentially when the user picks the category, XCelcius knows which data block to go to. Then when the user clicks on the specific KPI, the data for all the months for the KPI is copied to the target.
The chart reads from the target and displays the results. If all the KPI’s had the same scale then that’s all I would need to do.
In my case there is an additional level of complexity. I have KPI’s with very different scales and the chart does not display those correctly (not sure if that’s the way it is supposed to behave). To solve that problem I did a little trick… Instead of
I have 2 sections in excel, one to display % values and another to display absolute values and I drive the charts from different sections. Since the accordion can only fill one section, I have used formulas to populate the data in the 2nd region.Now I define a flag using an excel formula
=IF((C88 = “Sales”), 1,IF((C88 = “Inventory”),1,0)) that controls which chart will be displayed.
Using this approach I am able to hide one chart, and show the correct chart based on the selection. Not sure if there is a better way, but this works J
You can get the XLF file at http://www.box.net/shared/gg9f6lnh90
Some of you who love living on the bleeding edge of technology may be bleeding a bit when installing the latest Life Cycle Manager (LCM) and Xcelsius servers. Of course these servers should be installed when you install LCM or BusinessObjects XI 3.1 Service Pack 3. The only problem is that they aren’t.
They aren’t in the CMC, they aren’t in the CCM, and you can’t add them. For some reason you have to go in and run a script that tells Business Objects to go looking for them. From a command prompt you have to run a script that looks something like:
[BOE_install location]\win32_x86\scripts\addnode.bat -name [NODENAME] -siaport [Port Number] -cms [CMS Name] -user [User Name] -password [Password] -authentication [Type] -platform win32_x86 -update
EXAMPLE:
C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Business Objects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86\scripts\addnode.bat -name BOXISERV -siaport 6400 -cms BOXISERV -user Administrator -password [Administratorpassword] -authentication secEnterprise -platform win32_x86 -update
For better or worse BOTH the new Xcelsius servers and LCM server seem to be troubled by the same problem, with the same fix.
Please let me know how this works for everyone out there!
Thanks to Dallas Marks and Matt Hawkins at Consultancy by Kingfisher for help with the Xcelsius Server information.
There are various ways you can distribute the reports you designed in Crystal Reports even if you aren’t using Crystal Reports Server or any other Enterprise Servers. Some of the ways are the old standby methods such as PDF and MSWord. These methods work fine, as they definitively meet the needs of the organizations report readers.
Some designers choose to Export the reports to Excel or other applications. There are two methods of exporting to Excel – one has the suffix ‘Data-only’ in the Export box.
This particular Export Format allows the designer to include “Worksheet Functions” to the Export allowing more calculations on the report data. The other Export Format to Excel does not offer that option: it is more like a photograph of the report.
Other Export options include:
HTMLODBCRecord Style (columns with or without spaces)Comma Separated TextTab Separated TextRich Text Format and XMLAll of these are accessed through the Export dialog box above under the File Menu.
Aside from the Export, the report designer can assist a user in downloading the Crystal Reports Viewer. This is a free download sent to local machines. When the user wants to view the report, the user opens the Viewer and opens the report in the Viewer. The report is displayed as the designer intended it to be seen. The Viewer can also display any ‘drilldowns’ that were designed into the report, which many other formats cannot.
The last method I will mention here is crystalreports.com. This is a secure report hosting service available at crystalreports.com; for those that simply need to see reports. The user logs into specific URLs to view specific reports within the folders you have created. No need for hard copies or email attachments. This is available with free trial for three named users at above website. It offers several different options, with a monthly structured plan.
