[Eileen – I’m going to put a copy of this in the Wish List Topic ]
I’d like to try and put forward an enhancement request to BusinessObjects to get a Supervisor API developed.
I’m tired of being told that ‘direct manipulation of the repository is unsupported’ but not being provided with an alternative way of managing the repository.
Perhaps some one could raise it as an issue at the User Conference (I don’t think I’ll be flying from Australia to attend)
The problems I have with Supervisor are:
1) User management
I have a complex Organisational Structure with over 800 users located in approx 250 Organisational Units. Being a university, these Org Units get changed around on a weekly basis, requiring either a manual sync. of the repository or using the Import/Export file method.
The file method is doable, but is extremely clumsy.
2) Universe Access Management
I then need to manage 40+ universes, in areas such as HR,Finance,Student,Physical Resources etc. The easiest way I have found to manage access to these universes is to:
- Disable access to all universe from the Org Structure tree
- Create a new group in a ‘Universe Authority’ tree. eg ‘HR Universes’
- Add users to the new group
- Link the appropriate Universes to the new group
While this works, every new group I add slows the repository access down exponentially. Logging into reporter takes minutes because of all the checking it needs to do for access rights etc etc
3) Document Access Management
I then need to manage groups of users based on their ‘Roles’ within the organisation so that we can send reports to ‘HR Managers’ or ‘Finance Officers’
The only logical way to do this currently is to create yet more groups in the repository. This is a ‘double whammy’ - management of users in ‘role groups’ becomes an issue again, and repository speed also becomes an issue since every new group we add slows the repository access even more.
How will a Supervisor API help ?
1) User management
User Management and Synchronisation becomes much easier if you have an API that lets you:
a) Find a user, and return a list of groups to which they belong
b) Remove a user from a group
c) Add a user to a group
d) Add a new user
e) Delete a user entirely
f) Add a new group to a parent
g) Move a group to a new parent
h) Remove a group
Just about all of these things are done through the import/export batch update - it shoudln’t be hard to replicate them as an API
2) Universe Access Management
An API that allowed me to link/unlink a resource (in this case a Universe) to/from a user or group would allow the repository to be synchronised with an external source such as a database relation or perhaps even some sort of directory. The ability to list which resources were linked to a user/group would also be required.
In my case, I could avoid creating ‘Universe Authority’ groups and just link individual users/groups to a universe. We already have this information stored in a database, we currently have no ‘supported’ method of enforcing this programatically.
3) Document Access Management
In this example the API would allow me to link/unlink a ‘document resource’ to a user/group in the same way as in ‘Universe Access Management’
In the same way as above it would allow more flexible allocation of resources, and at the same time - provide a large performance benefit.
If I cannot convince BusinessObjects to create such an API, I’m thinking of trying to write my own - perhaps as a dll that people could link to in their VBA/ASP code with methods and properties for doing these things. My code would be setup for a SQLServer enivironment, but if others wanted to work with me to create Oracle/DB2/Sybase etc equivalents that would be great.
Sorry for such a long rant, it’s late and I need coffee
Hayden_Gill 
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
(BOB member since 2002-06-11)