[Hacking WebI] Customize “No data to retrieve” message

When there is no record fetched in a WebI query, we get the message like “No data to retrieve in <Data Provider>”. I have seen multiple times people asking for a way to customize this message or prevent the message from appearing. There is a blog in SCN which describes a way to do it for WebI on universe. But, for WebI on OLAP connection, the need remains.

In this blog, let me share the way I managed to do it.

This customization is not supported by SAP. There is no guarantee that this approach will work in future releases of the product.

This is going to affect all WebI reports.

Assumption:

This process has been tested in SAP BO BI Platform 4.1 SP5 installed in Windows server with Tomcat as application server. Product Locale & Preferred Viewing Locale is English (en_US).

Steps:

1. Stop Tomcat.
2. Delete the folder <Tomcat Installation Dir>\work\Catalina\localhost\BOE. This is a temporary folder and will be re-created once we start tomcat.
3. Navigate to <Tomcat Installation Dir>\webapps\BOE\WEB-INF\eclipse\plugins\webpath.AnalyticalReporting\web\webiDHTML\viewer\language\en\scripts.
4. Take a backup of the file viewPerspective.js and keep it in a safe location.
5. Open the file in notepad and search for the string displayNoDataToFetch.
6. Change the function definition to set your custom message.

   Original	function displayNoDataToFetch(s,cb){     showAlertDialog(“No data to retrieve in “+s,”Retrieving Data”,0,cb); }
   Custom message	function displayNoDataToFetch(s,cb){     showAlertDialog(“No data to fetch in “+s,”Retrieving Data”,0,cb); }
   Prevent the message from appearing	function displayNoDataToFetch(s,cb){     /* showAlertDialog(“No data to retrieve in “+s,”Retrieving Data”,0,cb); */ }

7. Save the file.
8. Start Tomcat.
9. Clear browser cache.
10. Wait till the temporary BOE folder is fully re-created in <Tomcat Installation Dir>\work\Catalina\localhost folder.
11. Test by running a WebI report from BI Launchpad in HTML view which has no data to retrieve.
12. Here is the customized message :