Hyperlinks in BO XI 3.0

system · July 8, 2008, 5:25am

Our environment is being upgraded to BO XI 3.0.
I spent some time looking into its new features and also seeing whether our reports in R2 SP2 work fine in 3.0.

Here I found that hyperlinks are not working. Theres a new way to create hyperlinks using a wizard in 3.0. Its very user friendly- with the code getting generated automatically as you browse to select the report. The code generated is similar to the code we already had for R2- so I believe ideally hyperlinks created in R2 should have worked without any changes in 3.0.

But the directory of opendocument.jsp has been changed in 3.0 installations.
It is not found in this directory :- /businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp.

For most hyperlinks changing
/businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp? in R2
To
…/…/opendoc/openDocument.jsp? in 3.0
Is working fine.

Can anyone suggest what changes the environment admins should do- to ensure Opendocument.jsp is available in “/businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp”? Should they reinstall Tomcat?

If this is not resolved we need to go to each report with a link and change them- and we have lots of those

Roshknee (BOB member since 2007-10-29)

system · July 8, 2008, 7:40am

I assume Reportlinking will have to be corrected manually - as I read already here on bob that the paths to the opendoc changed - and that IIS is not supported in BOXI 3.0 yet… so linked reports on IIS will have to wait…

Questions are:
can the new path be changed to comply with the old syntax? -
When will IIS be supported - any dates on that?

Wobi

Wolfgang Bidner (BOB member since 2002-08-30)

system · July 8, 2008, 7:51am

A) I would assume one could use a DNS entry for the new path to openDocument. As best practice the path should be centrally coded in a universe object in the future
B) .NET flavor of BOE XI R3.0 might be available sometime H2 2008 I would think.

Andreas (BOB member since 2002-06-20)

system · July 8, 2008, 10:10am

I am working with admins to try one thing. This is one of the known issues on 3.0. and heres some info on this

INFOVIEW

Opendocument for report linking may not function if the location of the openDocument is changed in XI 3.0. Following re-direct to be configured in the web server to resolve this issue.

Redirect:/businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp
To: …/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp

Will try this and let u know.

Roshknee (BOB member since 2007-10-29)

system · July 11, 2008, 10:42am

Andreas,

When you say the path should be coded in a universe object- doesnt this mean that we need to pull this dummy object into all our queries? How would we access this object otherwise…?

Roshknee (BOB member since 2007-10-29)

system · July 11, 2008, 1:59pm

Correct or create a separate query in your Webi document with just this one object.

Andreas (BOB member since 2002-06-20)

system · July 16, 2008, 5:50am

We did come up with a best practice on this.
Use the relative path …/…/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?
in place of /businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp? This change involves only changing the link, no query. The relative path works on R2 as well as 3.0

We didnt know that we should be using a relative path rather than full path in R2. Had we known that, the same hyperlink would have worked fine in 3.0 as well.

Roshknee (BOB member since 2007-10-29)

system · July 16, 2008, 2:39pm

Roshknee,

I appreciate your research on the relative path findings, but based on your input, here is what I’ve discovered, and right now I’m based totally in an XI R2 (SP3) environment:

Employing the relative path method is successful when a user exclusively executes the report in Infoview (read-only) mode, however, it “breaks” the report when one runs it under the Jave panel (modify mode).

It seems that we have to choose between using relative path which will smooth over the effects of running XI R2 and upgrading to XI 3.0; else employ the full path in XI R2, load XI 3.0, break reports and regroup.

Thanks,
John

jsanzone (BOB member since 2006-09-12)

system · July 17, 2008, 4:05am

jsanzone,

I’ve used the the full path in R2 SP2. And somehow I could never see the hyperlink work in edit mode anyway. Did it work for you earlier, and break when you change the opendocument path? I think thats just the way it is- hyperlinks work only in the Run mode…hope Im not missing anything here.

In any case, edit mode is only seen by us developers right? unless you have users who create their own reports? 3.0 has a GUI to generate the hyperlinks which would be useful for users- so hyperlink code gets generated automatically with a relative path.

Roshknee (BOB member since 2007-10-29)

system · July 17, 2008, 4:26pm

Rosh,

Yes, the link broke when I changed the opendocument path, but only for breaking in “modify mode” and it works both ways in read-only (Infoview).

Er, I think that it would be “relative path”, per tech support advisement, works only in the Run [read-only] mode.

That’s right, all of our users are expected to, for a large extent, to create their own reports (but I don’t think any of our users are routinely creating hyperlinked-type reports…). We provide about 100 “standard” reports and six hours of training in running read-only, “modify”, and ad hoc reporting instructions, then “turn them lose” and from there provide technical assistance. For our users to get best results, they have to show us that they’re trying and not expect us to develop all of their reports from scratch everytime.

This sounds wonderful! Aside from the pain in rebuilding (or going back now to employ relative path), upgrading to 3.0 sounds like a good deal!

Thanks
John

jsanzone (BOB member since 2006-09-12)

system · August 11, 2008, 9:44pm

Has anyone gotten relative addressing to work within a universe object?

My database is Oracle, so when compared to the syntax for a report variable, I need to change any " delimiter to ’ and for simplicity, I used simple object/prompt names with no spaces since URLEncode() is not an option within the Oracle definition of the object.

I can use the following successfully as a universe object:

'<a href=http://myserver:8080/businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp? &amp;sDocName=Child&amp;sType=wid&amp;sWindow=New&amp;sRefresh=Y&amp;lsS' || 'Region' || '=' || (mytable.REGION) || '>' || (mytable.REGION) || '</a>'

But this does not work… Will just get the Apache Tomcat welcome screen

 '<a href=../../opendoc/openDocument.jsp?&amp;sDocName=Child&amp;sType=wid&amp;sWindow=New&amp;sRefresh=Y&amp;lsS' || 'Region' || '=' || (mytable.REGION) || '>' || (mytable.REGION) || '</a>'

(mytable.Region) has parens because it is the expansion of an @Select() object.

Does the …/… need to be “encoded”?

Irwin Miller (BOB member since 2002-08-16)

system · May 14, 2009, 7:37am

Did anyone get this working for Oracle using the relative pathname, in a universe object?
I’m having a similar problem using XI3.0 and Oracle. I’m trying to define a hyperlink in a universe object so I can use it at the bottom of a drilldown hierarchy to open a detail report (using the method suggested in https://bobj-board.org/t/91307).

I can get the following to work fine as a formula in a report cell, when I click on it from InfoView it opens the detail report passing the correct values (though from java report panel it gives a formatting error):

="<a href=../../opendoc/openDocument.jsp?sDocName=DrillTest&amp;sType=wid&amp;lsSDistrict=" + [District Code] + "&amp;lsSWO=" + [Work Order Number] + ">"+[Work Order Detail]+"</a>"

But I’m having a lot of trouble getting it right as an object definition in the universe.
Initially I tried following Irwin’s example above:

I substituted my prompts and report name (changing names to remove spaces, to keep things simple):

'<a href=http://msdvmw177:8080/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?&amp;sDocName=DrillTest&amp;sType=wid&amp;sWindow=New&amp;sRefresh=Y&amp;lsS' || 'District' || '=' || '[District]' || '&amp;lsS' || 'WO' || '=' || '[WO]' || '>' || '[WOD]'  || '</a>'

It opens the correct report, but it doesn’t substitute the actual prompt values. When I click on the hyperlink I get a separate browser window where I can see the URL:
http://msdvmw177:8080/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?&sDocName=DrillTest&sType=wid&sWindow=New&sRefresh=Y&lsSDistrict=[District]&lsSWO=[WO]

I tried the same using the relative path:

  '<a href=../../opendoc/openDocument.jsp?&amp;sDocName=DrillTest&amp;sType=wid&amp;sWindow=New&amp;sRefresh=Y&amp;lsS' || 'District' || '=' || '[District]' || '&amp;lsS' || 'WO' || '=' || '[WO]' || '>' || '[WOD]'  || '</a>'

Again it opens the report, but this time I don’t get the separate browser window showing the URL, but can see from the ‘User Prompt Input’ panel that the prompt values aren’t being substituted.

I’ve tried various other combinations with single and double quotes, and using URLEncode, but I either get a parse error, or the URL is not correctly formatted.

Can anyone help with this please - it’s driving me mad!!

ChristineG (BOB member since 2009-05-13)

system · May 14, 2009, 1:43pm

Hi Christine

I never got relative addressing to work.

But in your syntax, I think the single quotes around the object are not needed.

Instead of

'District' || '=' || '[District]'

try

'District' || '=' || [District]

Irwin Miller (BOB member since 2002-08-16)

system · May 15, 2009, 2:55am

Thanks for the suggestion Irwin. When I took the quotes from the objects I got an Oracle error ‘ORA-00936 missing expression’ when I parsed.

However after much more trail and error and searching BOB, I finally got the following to work using table names, as in the following example (actual table names would replace text in italics):
‘<a href=http:…/…/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?&sDocName=DrillTest&sType=wid&sWindow=New&sRefresh=Y&lsSPrompt1=’||table.column1||‘&lsSPrompt2=’||table.column2||‘>’||table.column2||‘’

I found other posts in the Designer forum that said you couldn’t use object names in the universe, nor can you use URLEncode as it’s only a report function.

ChristineG (BOB member since 2009-05-13)

system · May 15, 2009, 8:04pm

So, we are having issues where we want to redirect a link to a new window, but that new window should be the only window that pops up. in R2, we were able to do the following:

javascript:mywin=window.open
‘newwin’);mywin.focus();

but how do we put the focus in XI R3?

anyone have a clue?
Thanks,
Namita

vatrbaby (BOB member since 2004-11-03)