Is there a way to make a global change to a large number of objects in a BO XI R2 universe?
We have a large fact table. The columns are defined as NOT NULL, so when there wasn’t a value the ETL job put in a ‘?’. The users would rather see nothing at all instead of the ‘?’.
We could easily resolve this with a decode or a case statement in the object definition (WHEN ‘?’ THEN ’ ’ ELSE column), but this change would have to be made to 70 objects. Is there a quick way to make this change and apply it to everything?
Only 70 objects? Seriously, probably quicker to just roll up your sleeves and do it. That said, there is a utility here … Mass update to object names / descriptions … that could be adapted to change the Select property instead of Description.
Updating the database is the ideal solution. But getting the DBA to do anything around here can be difficult and could take a while. Long term, I am going to try to get that done. But for the short term, I have to make the change in BO.
I will try downloading the utility and see if that works. But I have a feeling that Dwayne is right - it’s probably quicker to roll up my sleeves and do it myself. At least I’m not too busy today and have time to work on it.
Do you mean updates directly to the repository database? It would have been unsupported, but theoretically possible in v5 / v6 (universe definition was spread over actual database tables). In XI however, universes are stored as .unv files on the file system, no longer updatable by SQL.
I was under the impression that Mark meant to update the column in the database (UPDATE table SET column = ’ ’ WHERE column = ‘?’), not to update the object definition in the table. Since we’re on XI, we couldn’t do that anyway.
Got it now. I got lost as to “which” database was being updated (repository versus actual data). Of course the best solution is fixing the data itself, and johnkmc has already stated he is pursuing that as a long term solution. As we all know, sometimes you have to use less than ideal short term solutions along the way … {sigh}.
(BOB member since 2005-07-19)
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