Combine ( merge) two or more WebI Documents into One WebI document

Hi All,

This question has been asked many times in past with the details like ” I have 2 separate WebI documents, how can I combine these two WebI documents in to One”.

The expectation was that the combined report should contain all the charts/ tables, variables, Data providers and formatting of both the documents, without the need to create a combined report manually.

Good news is that there is a solution to this problem/requirement !!   ( i.e. you can marge two or more documents in to one, without being a need to create a new one). 🙂

WebI Rich Client is the powerful tool that makes it possible.

Lets assume that you have two WebI document ( Document 1 and Document 2). Now you want to modify Document 1 and want to bring in all of the content of Document 2 in to Document 1 and as  a result Document 1 would contain everything that Document 1 had + everything from Document 2.

i.e.   Document 1*  (updated one) = Document 1 + Document 2

Here are the steps :

1. Launch WebI Rich Client, Open Document 1 in “Design” mode. For our example lets say Document 1 contains 3 objects ( Year, Day of Week and Day of Year)

Structure of WebI document 1 is as follows :

2. Launch another session of WebI Rich Client, Open Document 2 in “Design” mode. For our exercise, lets assume that Document 2 contains 2 Objects ( Month and Day Of Quarter).

Structure of WebI Document 2 is as follows :

3. Right Click on table/ chart in Document 2 ( the table /chart / block from Document 2 that you want to copy over to Document 1)

“Paste” table/ chart in to  Document 1

4. This would add the desired block(s)  from Document 2 in to Document 1. You would notice all the required objects to create the block are also copied over to Document 1

If you look at the data providers for the document, You would notice that WebI  has add a new data provider “Query 2”  in to Document 1.

So now Document 1 has two data providers ( one that it originally had and a newly added data provider from Document 2) AND all the objects from Document 2 in to Document 1.

This method saves a lot of  time if you have to combine two or more documents in to one. You don’t have to create a document from scratch rather just copy and paste blocks from one document to another. Its a big gain in terms of effort saving if you are trying to merge very complex reports that has loads of variables and formatting and alerts in it.

If you don’t choose this method then the only choice left is to create a new document comprising of all the data providers, objects, formatting, variables etc, which may be very painful, specially in case of complex documents.

** BO/BI Platform version being referenced in this version is 4.2 SP3.

Cheers!

Ashish