WebI : Change Source : Option to apply change in all queries sharing the same data provider

Hi All,

Thought of sharing a very powerful yet rarely used option in WebI -> Change Source Wizard, called “Apply change in all queries sharing the same data provider”

This option is available as a check box in “Change Data Provider Wizard” as follows, so it’s easy to overlook this option –

“Apply change in all queries sharing the same data provider” option is very useful in case you have a WebI report that has a large number of data providers for which you are trying objects to map to a target source (like Universe, BEx  etc.) AND  Each object in Source has a clearly defined TARGET object  ( i.e in Source Object X  ( “Year” ) is always mapped to Object Y ( “Fiscal Year” )in target, regardless of which data provider it is in to.)

What magic this option would do for you?

Okay, if you select this option in “Change Source Wizard, you don’t have to remap objects of each of the data provider taking one data provider at a time, instead  WebI would present you a complete list of  unique objects ( from all data providers) in just one single screen ( in Object mapping screen), and the moment you complete object mapping on this single screen, you are done!! 🙂   : Each object in the WebI document whichever data provider it is from, is mapped to a TARGET object.

This would save a lot of time and effort in trying to map each of the data provider in WebI report one by one.

Lets try to understand this by an example –

Assume that there are two Data Providers in a WebI document ( Query 1 and Query 2). Query 1 contains “Fiscal Year”, “Fiscal Quarter” and “Fiscal Month Name ” while  Query 2 contains two objects ” Fiscal Quarter” and “Fiscal Week of Quarter”

Note that “Fiscal Quarter” is a common object between Query 1 and Query 2 while other objects are part of either Query 1 or Query 2

Now I choose the option to “apply change in all queries sharing the same data provider” in the Change Source Wizard to reap the benefits of making the changes only once for the whole WebI document.

Now what I see is :  I get only one “Object mapping” screen, with all the objects in the entire document as follows, otherwise I would have been forced to remap objects of Query 1 first and repeat the same cycle for Query 2  –

Once you click finish, each of the object in the document in remapped to target objects in one go, that’s it :-)!

** This features works for Relational Connection and OLAP Connections, both.

Cheers!

Ashish

**** BI Platform version that this post is based on is BOBJ 4.2 SP03