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Former Member

Hello Everybody

This is my first blog in SDN and I would like to put down some of the limitation faced when I tried to use WEB INTELLIGENCE reporting in BI4.0 with the new connectivity option of directly using a BEX query using BICS option. I have used the .UNV universe in 3.x environment and below are some of the limitation immediately became visible  with BICS approach.

Very Important ones.

1>     BEX  built using a sub query technique:  In this case the when the “Allow External Access to this Query” is checked the Report can’t even executed in Bex( or bex web), therefore can’t be used in BOBJ platform.

2>     Slice and Dice of the dimension in the report most of the time requires refreshing of  the Report:  This is due to the inherent nature of the Data base delegated Measure setting in the Virtual universe generated at the back end during run time, and setting can’t be changed because of that. We probably have to live with this even if we don’t want the calculation of Key Figure to be done by BW for every slice and dice in WEBI.

3>     The following Filtering technique which works for .UNV universe , doesn’t work for BICS

a.       Object Base Filter ( Filter comparing the same dimension)

b.      Sub Query

c.       Feeding the Output of One query to Another

4>     Combined Query Technique( Minus, Union etc) –  The Option for this also doesn’t seem to be enabled

5>     Drilling - while I absolutely love the way the Hierarchy perform with the new BICS option, the Good Old drilling doesn’t work with BICS and I think this is huge

Some Other:

6>     Display Attribute defined in BEX with change of description of the field, ordering etc, has no bearing in the WEBI report. All display attribute defined in the Back end info Object level are available, and can be confusing for the General Users. This doesn’t necessarily be a defect but confusing for the end users , depending upon the type of end users.

7>     Due to inherent nature of BICS approach, we can’t do the following.. but I see this as more as a different way of doing things instead of limitation etc.

a.       Can’t have predefined filters as .UNV

b.      Can’t group dimension in logical group

Since I see WEBI as the most important Self service and Report authoring tool by Business rather than IT, these can cause some problem and pain points for use of WEBI down the line with BEX/BICS.

There are others smaller one, line query Stripping etc… Let’s see if you faced similar issues and have a healthy discussion about these.

Thanks

Arun

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