I’ve tried searching the forums but couldnt find anything similar,
I’m trying to create a report that is going to use a fairly large IF statement that will change each month, the IF statement will be linked to various other reports so I thought maybe theirs a way to store the IF statement in a text file, upload it to webi and have various other reports look at the text file to pull out the IF statement and view the results in a cell, so each month all i’ll need to do is update the text file rather than go into each report and update the formula.
The formula works when stored in a dimension but would really help my cause if i can get the formula stored somewhere that various other reports can easily link to.
Something like this should be done in the universe. Short of copy / paste I don’t know of a way to get an “external” formula into a variety of Webi reports.
As Dave said, that “text file” is your universe.
I believe XI3.x allows you create your own custom function and call it from Webi but that requires the function to be written in C. Which would be worse than updating your universe on a monthly basis.
presently most of our work is done on BO 5.1 where we can import custom text files that we’ve created by grouping a list of 1690 codes from the universe and on a monthly basis we update the text file. We’ve been told that all our reporting is moving to webi.
I’ve managed to create an if statement that i can drop into an object (dimension) that recreates the grouping that we’d use within the text file and filter our reports from the results of the IF statement.
My problem starts each month theirs a possibility of more codes being added that need to be grouped, The IF statement can be recreated but than i would need to update all the reports that used the object with the if statement in it, and thought if i can upload the IF statement ( as a text file) to the server and somehow get an object to look at the if statement within the text file it would save me having to update all the objects that would use the IF statement (presently just over 55k characters in the if statement) and jsut update the text file each month
Were I work we have limitations, the universe is supplied by an external company and our reporting center doesn’t really have access to updating the universe outside what we can get webi to manipulate, we dont have administration control.
So would it be possible to upload an if statement saved in a text file, than get an object to look at the text file and use the if statement within it ?
Thanks in advance for any help and apologies on the late reply
If I understand you well, you are trying to work around the limitation of using external DP in Webi.
I assume you are on XIR2 since XI3.x Webi does support external DP.
Personally I don’t see how you can work around that limitation if you only have Webi reporting access.
Other than Universe option that folks mentioned before, there is the SDK route where you can write java code (using REBEAN API) that reads an external file and updates Webi formuals. Not sure if that’s something you can consider.
Well, something will have to change elsewhere, this is common when you are re-platforming a solution.
Any other way is going to be a heavy maintenance overhead, you will have to make this clearer to the people driving the project.
Rich client only, if you wish the file to be actually refreshable then this can be done locally, however, you cannot refresh this personal DP file, from within Infoview.
The original poster is not looking for an external data provider, they are looking for external storage for formula logic. Something to avoid a copy / paste operation on a number of different reports every month when the formula changes.
For a scenario like this, it would be ideal to handle it at database level (and neither at report nor universe level)
Because having more than 55k characters in an ever growing IF or CASE statement will kill the report to no end
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That’s not what I meant and what you are trying is not gonna work. Javascript runs on browser not on the server.
Here is what I was suggesting:
A java or .NET program that will open the Webi report, read the formula from the text file and update the formula in Webi and save it back to repository.
B!!!
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