Hi,
In a WEBi report there are two ways of defining a formula. The first one is to create a variable with the formula and refer this variable in the cell where the value needs to be displayed, and second way is to define the formula in the report cell itself.
For complex formulas like the once using ForEach and Nested Ifs it is preferred to have them defined in variables. But for simple formulas like concatenation of two character objects which of these approaches would be more efficient from performance perspective?
Initially I was under the assumption that both the approach should be the same as WEBi has to parse the formula irrespective of whether it is defined in a variable or directly in a cell.
In our analysis, we saw some posts/articles. Some of them says Variables are better and other says that defining in cells is much efficient. Can you guys help me out in this and tell me which of this would be a preferred way of defining simple formulas?
Also is there any documents or articles that any one know about which provides some information how the report variables and formulas are parsed by WEBi server and the difference in them.
as far as performance goes I am not aware of any difference. For my own sanity I prefer to define variables. This makes it easy if you want to use that same thing somewhere else. Also, if you are using the same variable on multiple documents then it may be preferable to create that logic as an object in the universe instead to standardize across all webi documents.
Even based on my analysis I felt that both of the approaches should be the same from a performance stand point. I agree that creating variables are more cleaner than defining a formula in a cell and also gives us a better handle on the calculations…
(BOB member since 2012-07-30)
(BOB member since 2007-10-16)