Object Formatting? Is this new in XIR3?

building semantic layer
1

Ok I just stumbled upon something I’ve never seen before. I don’t know if it’s new for XIR3 or not but I’m curious as to the purpose…

When you right click an object there is a menu item called “Object Formatting”.

It appears to let you format everything from the text/numeric/date formats as well as borders, fonts, shading etc…

What exactly is the purpose of this? Could I force end users to use a specific font by default, or place borders around objects? (Why would you even want to??) Does it work with WEBI?

The only useful item I can see here would perhaps be date formatting, as I would no longer need to use SQL syntax to convert date items to various formats, I could control it via formatting instead. Not sure if I’d want to necessarily as you can’t tell which objects have formatting applied or not and i’d appear as if I had duplicate objects.

Has anyone used this feature? Pros/Cons?

JPetlev (BOB member since 2006-11-01)

2

It’s been around a long time. :slight_smile: It is very useful to apply standard formats. For example, the default format for numeric values is #,##0.00 which doesn’t work so good for Invoice Number or Customer Number or things like that.

What it does it provide the initial format. The user is allowed to override it on the report. Changing the object format does not update any existing reports. It only sets the default for any new reports.

Dave Rathbun :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-06)

3

Hmm I can see where this might be useful, I usually leave formatting to the reportside to determine… but one item I hate messing with are dates… I tend to create 3-5 date objects in various ‘standard’ formats such as “MM/DD/YY”, “YYYY/DD/MM”, “MonthName DD, YYYY” etc…

I do that so that end users don’t have to figure out date formatting (It’s one of those stupid questions I got asked a LOT “How do I format the date…” Especially useful when people are trying to key in date prompts…

What I’m wondering, is if there is a benefit to using Object Formatting vs SQL convert statements. Right now my date object looks something like Convert(Char(10), [Vouchers].[Paydate],101) (Using MS SQL)

I’m thinking object level formatting would be faster as SQL doesn’t need to compute the date calculation (not that it’s really intensive however).

My main two ‘cons’ I can think of that would make me NOT want to use Object formatting are:

  1. Are Object Formatting Applied only at the end report level or within the SQL? (So that a preformatted date matches a database date format)
  2. Is there any easy way to see which objects have object level formatting applied? Without a visual identification, I could see this potentially causing de-bugging hassles.

JPetlev (BOB member since 2006-11-01)

4

Formatting is only done report-side, and remember it’s only used as the initial default format. Users can change it to whatever they want.

Advantages of formatting a date versus converting to character are simple: you a date and can use all date functions, and it will sort like a date. :slight_smile:

There is no way that I am aware of to know by visual inspection that an object has a default format or not.

Dave Rathbun :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-06)

5

Lol I should have realized this when I typed out this question… I am still used to my old companies database which had many dates stored in varchar format in SQL due to some horrible data cleansing issues where we’d get words in datefields and all sorts of other crazy stuff.

Thankfully we have a DBA position here which can devote time to the ETL process to clean up those types of issues as they arrive.

Thanks for the claification though, not sure why I never noticed that option before.

JPetlev (BOB member since 2006-11-01)

6

The Universe documentation spreadsheet available in the BOB Downloads section (https://bobj-board.org/t/59650) will extract the default format options. The Universe Documentation option from within the Designer tool will also list the default format but may be harder to find and see than the Excel extraction.

But I am not aware of any way to visually see if an object has a default format from the Designer tool either.

7

I find it useful to specify the format/give an example in the object description, especially for dates where I generally don’t give the users a LOV.

debbie

Debbie :uk: (BOB member since 2005-03-01)

8

I always do this, also, for all date objects.

One other thing to note, is that the format is not forced retrospectively to reports.

Once set it will apply to newly created reports only…

Mak 1 :uk: (BOB member since 2005-01-06)

9

I’ve recently found that hyperlinking on numbers formatted the number as #,###,###. Not particularly useful when passing those vairiables to reports or other applications. No matter how I formatted it in the report it remained in that format - until I applied the formatting in the Universe.

This was true on both dev and prod environments. This may not affect your system but it certainly did mine.

It can also be quite useful for working with currencies too.

dessa :madagascar: (BOB member since 2004-01-29)