Webi 4.x tricks : summary

[wmarcy]

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to share with you some tips on the advanced use of Web Intelligence. These few tutorials allow you to give more value to your existing documents or to come or just to give you ideas for your future designs.

All my tricks are just a focus on some capabilities of the application, if you want more details about what you're able to do with it, share your thought with me I'll be happy to talk about it.

All entries are ranked by difficulty and by authors because I spend a lot (lot, lot, lot) of time searching on SCN great tips on Web Intelligence and some good entries are unfortunaltely hidden...so it's time to raise your hands guys (and girls ).

New features in Web Intelligence 4.2

Performance	Charts & other features
New WebI feature in BI4.2 – Parallel Queries by robert.twigg	How to build a Custom Elements service for SAP Web Intelligence 4.2 by pascal.gaulin

New features in Web Intelligence 4.2 SP3

SAP BI 4.2 SP3: What's New in Web Intelligence by  christian.ah-soon available here SAP BI 4.2 SP3: What's New in Web Intelligence

Summary

Tricks	Design	Performance	Sizing	Auditing	Following	Debugging

Legend

Picture	Level	Description
	Level 1	Difficulty is very low. Easy to set up and you can turn easily your existing document into value-added report effortless
	Level 2	Difficulty is low. Use analysis tools to interact with your report and give extra value to your operational reporting.
	Level 3	Difficulty is medium. Some of features used are advanced features and you've to be familiar with Web Intelligence.
	Level 4	Difficulty is high. Damn, your Webi document is so interactive and so cool. Restless to show and share it with others !
	Level 5	Difficulty is extreme. How did he do that ? I've read 8 times the document and I still understand nothing.

Tricks

Difficulty	Author	Link to document
	abhijit.ingale	WEBI 4.0 Trick - Creating Progress Bar
	rakesh.pattani2	BOBJ Trick To Display Table Data In Hierarchy Format
	durgamadhab.mishra	Webi tricks : Selecting Top N customers by Sales Percentage using a Slider
	william.marcy	Webi tricks : Interactive selecting and viewing TOPn data
	abhijit.ingale	WEBI - Dynamic Line Chart driven by Input Control
	harsha.ganapathy	Creating a Sparkline chart for IPad
	neha.kumari4	How to use formulae to change date and time formats in WebIntelligence
	kaufmann.andreas	alternate row colors in a break
	tauseefali.mir	Dynamic Variables using Input Control
	naga.vaibhav	Custom message to replace 'No Data in the query'
	victorgabriel.saizcastillo2	All you need to know about #TOREFRESH
	michael.thompson	Webi tricks: How to build a butterfly chart
	huu.nguyen	Linear & Polynomial Trend Lines in Webi
	michael.thompson	Webi tricks: Bars embedded into rows
	huu.nguyen	WebI Trick: Line chart to show running average for each year
	harshil.joshi	Date Variables in Web Intelligence
	huu.nguyen	WebI Trick: Top N data for any integer N using Entry field Input controls
	tanb.gupta	How to Add Document links (Interlink WEBI reports) in SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence 4.0
	bosateesh%40gmail.com	Show Trend Icon/Arrows in webi as per conditions
	huu.nguyen	Conditional formatting based on User input
	kohesco	Dynamic Visibility within a Webi Report
	David G	WebI trick: Create a SEARCH Input Control for your WebI report part!
	bosateesh%40gmail.com	Dynamic Ageing Buckets in Webi
	sujigrandhi	Dynamic Visibility - Input Controls with Ranking
	jonathan.brown	Creating a Webi doc off of an unmanaged Excel data source on a network share
	rakesh.pattani2	Merging Charts in WebI
	rogerplankgoulart1234	How to insert a Gauge chart inside a WEBI Document
	selvarasan.subramanian	Dense Ranking in SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence
	jordan.bishop	How to create a Speedometer inside of a Web Intelligence document
	mhmohammed	Secret Custom Format (for Date) in Webi
	swapnil.bhootwala	String aggregation on WEBI report level.
	rogerplankgoulart1234	How to set a WEBI document to autorefresh each n seconds
	kwaja	How to grant filtering functionality for viewers/end-users on 'Input Control' enabled report blocks(...
	sandeepsinha327	Dimensions as Input Control- Dynamic Control | SCN
	rogerplankgoulart1234	Merging 3 Data Providers compatible 2 by 2
	rogerplankgoulart1234	Implementing a calendar like filter in the body of a report
	didz05	Usage of mini charts in tables
	didz05	Sort columns using input controls in read-only access
	didz05	Top-Bottom ranking using input controls in read-only access
	didz05	Display vertical labels in tables
	mhmohammed	Sum & Avg lines in Chart
	mhmohammed	Accurately positioned Custom Comments in Column Charts
	didz05	Display numbers in English words
	niraj.parihar2	Dealing with Null Values in a Chart
	didz05	Charts windowing
	mhmohammed	Relative positioning of a block w.r.t 2 (or more) blocks OR Container in Webi

Designing

This section will help you designing the structure of your Web Intelligence document. You will be able to highlight your data into a Webi document well-designed with some best practices from experts.

Author	Link to document
william.marcy	Designing smart report with Web Intelligence
merlijn.ekkel	Best Practices for Web Intelligence Report Design

Performance

Challenge accepted ! Once your document is complete and functionnal, think about performance. A well designed document is nothing for user if it opens in 10 minutes. So performance is the key to help users to understand the power of Web Intelligence. jonathan.brown made a full document containing all tips for Optimizing the Performance of Web Intelligence Documents.Others related documents can be added to this table to find easily how to optimize performance.

One of the big challenge with SAP BusinessObjects on SAP landscape is to get best performances with Web Intelligence based on SAP BW using BICS (Business Intelligence Consumer Service) connection. @Kurt.holst gave us a complete overview of best practices using Webi against SAP BW.

Author	Link to document
jonathan.brown	Tips for Optimizing the Performance of Web Intelligence Documents
kurt.holst	How to Performance Optimize SAP BusinessObjects Reports Based Upon SAP BW using BICS Connectivity

Sizing

Author	Link to document
matthew.shaw	Performance Tips: Getting the most out of your Web Intelligence Processing Servers

Auditing

Author	Link to document
matthew.shaw	WebiAdminTool - Business Intelligence (BusinessObjects) - SCN Wiki

Following

The Web Intelligence Bulletin (this page) is a timely and regularly-updated information source providing links to hot issues, new documentation and upcoming events of interest to Web Intelligence Users and Administrators (extract from the Web Intelligence Bulletin - source : see below).

Author	Link to document
adam.stone &  ted.ueda & jason.everly & michael.neville	The WebI Bulletin

Debugging

A structured introduction and collection of hints, basic product information, best practices and links in the area of Web Intelligence. The goal is to provide end users a basic knowledge package to avoid or solve issues during the day to day business.

Special ovation to timoseufert and ALL the BI TEAM HUNGARY for their work knowing that Webi incidents can make you crazy. Good job team !

Additional ressources

You can see more things about Web Intelligence on space dedicated :

SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence

Creating Extensions to SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-54507

And more official documentation on Help Portal at :

SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence 4.1 – SAP Help Portal Page

One more thing, if you want to index your entry with a "Webi trick", leave a comment and I'll add your link ASAP. I'll update this document frequently with new entries I'll find out on SCN.

Have fun !