I thought I had this covered but what has been happening right now has gotten me very confused.
I had few objects in a universe and some reports were built off of these objects in WebI. According to a new requirement I hid these objects in the universe by using “Hide item” and exported it back to the CMS. When I try to create a new report using WEBI on this universe, i cannot see the hidden objects, so far so good. But in the old reports that already used them, when i go to “Edit Query”, not only do these objects show up in the Report but also in the Data Panel of WEBI. Here is where I presumed that they won’t show up thus preventing users from using them or modifying the query using with them anymore.
The whole idea to hide the objects in the Universe was to keep the users from using these objects in future all the while the reports that already used them would keep on refreshing as usual.
I thought that one can achieve this by simply hiding the objects in the universe, but here the hidden objects shows up in the old reports and users can use them thus beating my purpose. Are there any configuration that needs to be touched to achieve this?
Any ideas and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Yes the old reports should keep on refreshing as usual no issues there. But the problem is I can see the hidden objects in my list of choice fields in the data panel when I edit this old report. Keeping the fields in the report is good but showing them in the data panel so in future one may use it or say write a filter using it is what I wanted prevent - not only in the new reports but also in the existing reports. In other words, don’t break the reports that use them but don’t let the users use them in future in any case as well.
Isn’t it supposed to hide them in data panel or is my understanding of the BO is skewed?
I am good with the fact that objects will be hidden in the new reports, the only worrying part is that these objects will still be usable in the old reports. I don’t have a problem for the hidden objects to show up on the report out put, the only issue is that my supervisors will balk at the idea that users will continue to see these objects in the query panel’s list of objects from the universe and hence keep on doing stuffs like adding them or creating new filters with these objects. Once it is hidden I presumed that users shouldn’t be able to edit reports and add new information with these objects - even in the old reports.
As discussed, hiding only obscures them from being added. You can’t really avoid the report throwing an error because to get them to disappear you either have to 1) delete them or 2) raise the object security level to one above the security level your users have.
This ultimately leaves them in the report but users without that security level still see an error.
The short story = no way to easily obscure an object that is already in a report.
Another idea though is using column masking. If you have it, and don’t want people to see it, override the SQL so they don’t get data.
I believe that would break the original reports though since the users wouldn’t have access to the object, I could be wrong so worth testing. Is it really such a big deal though?
I added Security Access Level restriction on this object from “Public” to “Controlled” but when refreshing I got an error some thing like “An Internal Error Occurred while calling some process”. Was this the type of restriction you were pointing to Mark?
If you add a security restriction, it will break the reports.
The reason the object has to be visible on existing reports is so you can remove it. Else you have no way to interact with it. Yes, a user can take an existing report and play with the now hidden objects, but there’s really no way around that.
If you were talking about Deski reports, then I would suggest just making the queries uneditable in the Data Manager. This allows reports with hidden objects to be refreshed, but would stop users from manipulating the hidden objects.
I’ve just looked at Webi Rich Client which has an ‘Allow other users to edit all queries’ checkbox in the query properties. This should perform the same function, although it’s more of a broadbrush setting in that it can’t be set query by query. (Add it to the missing functions list!)
I don’t know if similar functionality is available in the other ‘flavours’ of Webi.
In the data provider from the option to change existing universe select the same universe and now the objects which are hidden at universe level wont be available. All you have to do is you have to manually select the same universe for each data provider.
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