Technical Articles
Displaying WebI report parts via openDocument in BI 4.x
This first blog post of mine will briefly describe how one can view just one report part (chart, table, free-cell, etc.) of a WebI document in a custom web app via the openDocument interface of a SBOP BI 4.0 platform. This functionality is quite similar to the possibility to view those report parts in BI Workspaces and may help anyone who ever wanted to display parts of WebI documents without the toolbars and additional analytical functionality.
The URL to be used is the following:
http://[servername]:[port]/BOE/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?sIDType=CUID&iDocID=[CUID of WebI doc]&mode=part&sReportPart=[Reference to the report part to be shown]
The parts of the URL in squared brackets are to be replaced like this:
[servername]:[port] is the name and TCP-port, where your web (app) server is hosted, that has the BO Webmodules deployed (In a standard BO install it is the servername:8080)
[CUID] is the unique identifier of the WebI Document from which the part should be displayed. It can be found in the properties of the object in the CMC/Launchpad.
[Reference to the report part to be shown] is the internal reference to the part that should be shown in a format like UIREF:RID=1:BID=17 whereas RID seems to be the IDof the reports inside the WebI Doc and BID the block-ID of the report parts. To get these identifiers one can utilize the “ReportStructure Monitor” in debug-mode in the WebI Editor (hold left shift key down and move mouse pointer to lower left corner). Here shown from the sample report “Formatting Sample”:
RID:
BID:
So the final URL on my test-system looks like:
and shows the following output (after logging in to the BI platform or with an existing session of course):
Although this functionality is not documented it was tested to be working at least in BI 4.0 SP4 standard-install.
Hi Harald,
Thank you for sharing a great explanation for a doc linking to specific object parts. It happened to be exactly what we were looking for.
We have followed the procedure and able to open a document to the desired report id and table id, but the data will not display even with adding sRefresh=Y. Further, the window opens up with no footer toolbar to refresh manually.
We are on BI4 SP04 patch1
What am I missing?
Sincere regards,
Lee Lewis
Here is link in webi
http://sapdbo.insummit.com:8080/BOE/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?sIDType=CUID&iDocID=M1AsFxQAAJV1AGsAJAAAVF0OAgoKAFYAAAA&mode=part&sReportPart=UIREF:RID=3:BID=27&sRefresh=Y
Hi Lee,
during my tests I used refreshing the WebI parts plus passing in parameter values as well. When adding sRefresh=Y just after the ? and lsS[parametername]=[value] at the end of the URL it works pretty well on my system (BI 4.0 SP4 no patch).
The intention of this solution is to show parts of WebI documents in iFrames/iViews/Portlets/Webpages without all the toolbars, so not seeing any of them is by design.
Is there something special to your report, what do you actually see (empty table, error message, nothing, ...) and what happens when you view the report in the Standard DHTML viewer?
Are you maybe not picking up the right report part (RID,BID)?
Regards,
Harald
Hi Harald,
We found the problem was when either the source or target webi had a hiearchy dimension anywhere in the document. If we use just a flat dimension, the url works great! Hiearchies are so cool, but very problematic it seems with webi.
As for controls, do you know how to open the doc in the full webi reader?
Again, thank you so much for this blog, it was just what we were looking for!
Lee Lewis
Hi Lee,
opening the doc in the webi viewer is product standard of the openDocument-interface. Just leave the two parameters "mode=part&sReportPart=... " away and you get the whole doc in the viewer. More information about the openDocument-interface can be found here:
http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir4/en/xi4_opendocument_en.pdf
Regards,
Harald
HI Harald,
Thank you soo much for this blog, great work keep posting. 🙂
Arjun KT
Hi Harald,
This seems to be a very helpful way to display the report parts.
When i open the Debug window, i cannot see the Report Structure Tab. There are just about 6 tabs in my Debug window. Lot of tabs are missing.
Is there any other way other to find out the RId and BId ?
We are on 4.0 SP 3 patch 16
Regards
Vaibhav
Hi Vaibhav,
actually I have never seen a debug window, where the Report Structure tab is missing and I have no idea, what could cause this behavior.
The only other method I am aware of to get the IDs is to export the WebI Doc to XML, which is afaik only possible using the RESDK, not openDoc. When I have some more time, I will write another blog post on how to achive this and how to get hold on the WebI Report Parts using this SDK.
Regards,
Harald
Hi Harald,
Thanks for your reply... Finally I found out the difference.
In the BO implementation we have, the debug window has a tab called ReportOutput.
For each change I make in the report, the entire Report structure is logged into the Report Output Tab.
Regards
Nagavaibhav
Great job, Harald. The sReportPart works great when you wish to restrict functions away from users. However on report with large data, pages really matters when it comes to client side performance. Is it possible to use reportpart same time has the paging on report?
Hi Norman,
as far as I know, this is not possible. If you view report parts, the pagination is lost and you get back one big object.
Regards,
Harald
Hi Harald,
One of my customer found that when using this way to view part of webi report we could not do drill down/up on the opened report. Is it by design?
Best Regards
Yue
There seems to be a known bug in BI 4.1 regarding this functionality, which is documented here:
http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1989540
If you use this functionality and observe undesired results, please check this OSS note.
Regards,
Harald
How do you get to open debug mode in WEBI 4.3 ¿?