Sorting Months in Webi

Sorting dates, and particularly months, in Webi can often seem quite difficult. Us humans believe that months are sorted January, February, March and so on. Machines will tell you that months are sorted April, August, December…
If you’re here reading this, you may have one of these problems:

1. My drop-down list of months doesn’t sort properly.
   
2. My report block doesn’t sort properly.
   
3. My chart doesn’t sort properly.

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Drill-down in Xcelsius using BI Services and Webi

BI Services allows you to publish a Web Intelligence report block as a web service. You can then consume this web service in Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius) to display the data in your dashboard. For many purposes, this can be used as a replacement for Live Office.

So, why not just use Query as a Web Service? Good question. If QaaWS service suits your needs, then use QaaWS, but in my opinion there a two big benefits to using BI Services over QaaWS:

1. You can apply logic and aggregation to transform your raw data into a more usable data set, better matched for the intended use in your dashboard.
   
2. You can schedule the Webi report, so that when you open your dashboard, data is being fetched from the Webi cube, not directly from your data source, providing faster load times.

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BI4.0 Xcelsius Queries - Interactive Components

In SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 (BI4.0), you can now create a query from within Xcelsius (aka Dashboard Design). In this post, I'll create two queries and two components. One query will write to the Excel sheet, the other will be bound directly to a chart. I'll assume you know how to create a query in BI4.0 Dashboard Design; if not, check this out.


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Configuring BI4.0 Connection: Advanced Analysis to Microsoft Analysis Services 2008R2

The process needed to get Advanced Analysis connected to a Microsoft Analysis Services cube is to copy a small handful of files and make them available as a web site through IIS. BusinessObjects will then connect to a that IIS site in order to send/receive requests to and from your cube.

These steps assume that everything is on the one machine, but of course this is not necessary (and the joy of using IIS/xmla to connect from client to data source).


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BI4.0 Xcelsius Queries

In SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 (BI 4.0), you can now create a query from within Xcelsius (aka Dashboard Design). Read on for some examples of how this very nice new feature can be used.


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