Question about changing the universe of reports using VBA

building semantic layer
1

Hi,

We are using BO 5.0.2 here and I am just trying to decide on how to do something.

We have/are planning to have a number of otherwise identical sources of data - a “yesterday” version, a “month” version, 4 “quarter” versions, and also associated Development, 2 Test versions, and a “play” version of the data. These “versions” will be basically a snapshot of the data at a point in time, and the requirement for so many is as specified by our users.

My initial idea is to set these all up as otherwise identical universes pointing to different schemas in our oracle database.

We want to be able to have a single report which we can move from one universe (or one version of the data) to another. Now, of course using the client we can do that manually, but we would like to be able to do it via the VBA, and I can’t see a property or method in the documentation which allows us to do this. We can, of course, get the name of the universe via the Data Provider objects’ “Universe” propery or “UniverseName” property, but these are readonly.

So my question is:

  1. Does anyone know of a way to do this?, and 2. Is this the right way to attempt this - should I not be looking at separate universes?? Is there a better way???

Of course, we could just have 9 copies of each report, but we already have 160 reports - to then multiply this by 10, and accept the associated maintenance headache doesn’t seem very wise to me…

Any information greatly appreciated,

Regards,
Richard.

Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)

2

Richard,

What you can do is define a dynamic universe connection and keep only one universe and one version of each document.

In you universe connection you can use @variable(‘your_variable’) syntax to define the user, the password or database. Your_variable can be for instance bouser - if you want to reuse the bo user name to connect to your database - or anything else. Depending on how you want to use this feature, you must define a connection with specific parameters such as Disconnect after each transaction if you want to change the active database without closing the document.

Then you use a vba script to give the desired value to your_variable. In this way, you have only one document and one universe to access several databases (that must have the same structure).

Christophe

Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)

3

Just a short note to thank Christophe whose suggestion I will certainly use, and Brent whose suggestion I think I will find very usefull for another job I have.

Regards,
Richard.

Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)