Reporting on the Metadata in a Universe

general discussion
1

I have tried searching, but didn’t find what I was looking for.

I am a report/univese developer with no admin experience, so this may be easy…I don’t know.

I have a client that is requesting a report which displays each Object Name from the Universe, the associated Description and the Associated Select Clause. They eventually want to download that into Excel and manage the Universe Object List against a list generated internally from reporting specs.

Is there a way to generate a report like this:

Universe Object Description Select
Object1 This is Object1 dbo.table1.object1

etc?

Thanks!

Contractor_D (BOB member since 2007-04-13)

2

Hi,

Check these 2 utilities from BOB’s Downloads section if they are of any help to you:

Document a universe using Excel and the Designer SDK
Mass update to object names / descriptions

Marek Chladny :slovakia: (BOB member since 2003-11-27)

3

Thanks for the tips. I was hoping that there was something in the BO Admin Tool set that would do that for them.

I will try this, it will take a bit since I am going through Remote Desktop and then through a couple of servers to get to Bus Obj.

Contractor_D (BOB member since 2007-04-13)

4

Hi,
I am a BO-admin newbie as well and I would like to resubmit the question.

We have a couple of large universes in production that we continually are expanding. We would like to provide up-to-date metadata information to our users with minimal effort…
Has anybody created a WI report which displays Object Names from the Universe + the associated Description. We would like to expose such a report to our users. By refreshing the report it should be possible to display the latest information.

The excel utilities are fine, but in our case they require regular file updates has to be published to our intranet.

Thanks

nmw (BOB member since 2007-02-07)

5

Hi nmw,

Which BO version do you use?

I think that what you need can be done in BO 6.5 and less. I am not sure about BO XIr2 as there is no BO repository data accessible by an ordinary SQL :nonod:

Marek Chladny :slovakia: (BOB member since 2003-11-27)

6

Hi Marek,
We use BO XIr2. I realise this is the problem.
Thanks for your reply.
Nicholas

nmw (BOB member since 2007-02-07)

7

We have Metadata Manager that provides all these information. But of course, it is not a free tool.

substring :us: (BOB member since 2004-01-16)

8

Do you know you can get a full list of all the objects in the universe by using the File… Print option in Designer? Furthermore, if you go into the Tools… Options menu in Designer, click the Print/PDF tab and mark the checkboxes under the Full Description area, you can will get more information when you print such as:

Object: Admit Date
Type: Date 
Description: For inpatients, the date of admission. For outpatients, the date of the visit. 
Select equivalent: DEVCDIS.BILL_ENCTR.BILL_ADMS_DT
Where equivalent:
Qualification: dimension 
List of values: 0ah, editable, manual refresh, not exportable 
Security access level: 0 
Can be used: in result, in condition, in sort 
Object status: show

I don’t know of a way in Business Objects to automatically generate this listing on demand, but the price is right (free). You could use a tool like MacroExpress to record a macro of the clicks necessary to generate the report and put the PDF in a directory every hour. Then use Business Objects file events to pick up the report, store it in Infoview and run a script to delete the file in the directory. Then users would have an up-to-date listing every hour.

Here’s MacroExpress: http://www.macroexpress.com/

cppwiz :us: (BOB member since 2007-09-13)

9

If you google, you will find that there are several 3rd-party BO partners who have developed tools that will do this. Unfortunately there’s no simple way to do this “out of the box” with XI. But you can purchase some add-on software that will do it.

dnewton :us: (BOB member since 2004-01-30)