Greetings? I have looked on the forum for this before posting so I did try Here’s my question:
Someone decided many moons ago to write a custom java front end that contains a bunch of field names and check boxes. Once the user selects these check boxes that they want to output, they hit excecute. Lo and behold, it opens up Webi XIR2 (yes it’s old) and only the fields they chose are now present dynamically built in a table from the selection passed (assuming the builder used a form of openDoc). We are in the midst of shutting this down since we are on 4.0 on a separate server platform. We do not want to build a custom java front end. It was suggested maybe the Crystal Dashboards can do this? Before you ask, yes, I built a demo using input controls and prompts directly in Webi. Nope, the biz is insistent on having those darn check boxes to pick and choose what fields they want dynamically output. And yes, I also offered to train how to drag and drop. Tough to convince the biz sometimes Anyways, if there is a way to design a very simple front end using the Dashboard tool that will simply pass what fields to display on a webi report…help or suggestions would DEFINATELY be appreciated! I have built dashboards before, but never having to dynamically select fields to pass to webi for reoprt output. Again community…thank you.
Btw…that was SUPPOSED to say Greetings!. Sorry… .
In doing some reading…looks like I will probably have to do something with openDoc calls…and that’s fine. I was just hoping that someone has an example or suggestions so I can use the Dashboard tool to just as a simple field selector (btw…there are 20 files from which the user can pick and choose to pass to web to build a results table dynamically).
For those reading this topic I started, I have given it some thought, and I am thinking I would have to set up a derived table in the universe that contain the 20 fields that the user can pass. However, I am still stumped how I can get the results to dynamically build the table. The one way I thought of was to prebuild a table with 2 columns and have those fields equal Dim1-Dim20. Dim1 would equal the value that the user chose for field 1, Dim2 would be field 2, etc. Kinda sloppy, but I am out of ideas. Like I said, just a simple front end screen that has prompts that I would pass to webi, and the 20 fields that the user can dynamically pass as the results into the table. Thoughts? Thanks again!
Your business wants to spend time and money re-inventing what webi was designed to do in the first place?
You could create a table holding the values selected by the user by writing the values in with scripts. It’s doable, but clunky and utterly pointless…
Could you not create a nice simple universe with just a selection of objects? Then use the tiem freed up to give them a dashboard or something ritzy instead?
Thanks for replying. BELEIVE ME, I tried telling and showing the simplicity of Webi. Hard to get simpler than drag and drop. The biz can be very stubborn and the last thing I want to do is reinvent the wheel. Not to mention that the universe is linked another universe containing a bunch of dimension tables…of which NONE are linked together (and before you ask…heck no was I the original creator of this diasaster universe ). I have already told them that it needs to be rebuit, from scratch in IDT. I think that the users will have to conform for a while…otherwise, hire someone else to do it I don’t see a simple and quick solution to this. Thanks again!
Been thinking about this (I need to get out more, don’t I?). If you want to present the user with a list of objects to choose from, why not do it all in xcelsius? Present the objects to the user, present the operands and the display output/sort order etc. Store all those in cells in xcelsius then build your SQL string from them, run the query and pull the ouput back into xcelsius for display. Don’t use webi/Bobj at all.
This is how I do stuff. Once you get your head around it, it’s fast and powerful and you don’t have to worry about how Bobj is mangling the data.
Here’s my question:
.
(BOB member since 2005-03-01)