David Taylors' Business Intelligence Blog

I think I may have found what you are looking for. This is an excellent guide that you can use to bring best practices to all your Xcelsius work. This 16 page guide is an well thought out guide for using standard around colors, data organization, testing, etc. Implementing these best practices will undoubtedly improve your ability to create world-class Xcelsius models that are easy for others to maintain after the fact.

This guide was written by Matt Lloyd with contributing materials from Ryan Goodman and Richard Reynolds.

Download it today!! You’ll be glad you did.

If you need to troubleshoot Xcelsius 2008 runtime messages here is another link you might want to check out. I recently ran across an error message “2170″ but was not able to find it on my original list of error messages, but then I finally found it.

Click Here for the description of the runtime message.

The solution to the 2170 message when using Xcelsius was provided via YOUR posted comments to my blog.  Thank you!!

Most of the time, the issue has to do with the crossdomain.xml file.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
 <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false" />
 <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />
</cross-domain-policy>

For more information about installing the crossdomain.xml file, read my previous article.  If you are STILL having problems check out these two posts.

Check out the answer on the BusinessObjects forums :

https://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5656068#56560685656068

There is also additional information in the BOB forums:
http://www.forumtopics.com/busobj/viewtopic.php?t=110827

I’ve been spending a lot of time of late getting myself familiar with the new interface of Xcelsius 2008 and I like it so much better than the older Xcelsius 4.5 interface. The embedded Excel spreadsheet is real dream and the new Data Manager, which manages all the external connections make it easy to keep track of where data is coming from.

Xcelsius Error 2170 or 2048

There were a couple of things I learned during the transition that I thought would be good to share. The first is around security. With the release of Xcelsius 2008 we have moved to support for Flash 9. In Flash 9, they have tightened up security a bit more. Here is one of the first messages I got when trying to run a Xcelsius file with LiveOffice or Web Service connected data. My problem is a flash security issue. SWFs running locally (directly from a user’s computer) have additional restrictions imposed on them since version 8 of the Flash Player.

This error is coming from the Adobe Flash Viewer. If you see error messages like this in the future, you can look them up here. This has the complete list of ActionScript runtime errors.

To get around this error I need to tell my application server that it is okay to trust requests from other domains. This means I will need to create a crossdomain.xml file for your application server.

I have created a crossdomain.xml file that you can download here:
http://trustedbi.com/files/crossdomain.xml

Here are the contents of the file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
 <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false" />
 <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />
</cross-domain-policy>

On Tomcat, you need to add this file to the /tomcat/webapps/ROOT directory. Each application server is different, so you may need to check the manual for your specific application server.

For More Information on crossdomain.xml

For more information on crossdomain.xml look here. Even more information about crossdomain.xml and Macromedia is found here.

Hope this help you achieve smooth sailing with Xcelsius 2008!

I recently starting moving my BusinessObjects Enterprise Xcelsius models from XIr2 to XI 3.0. I have found that you may need to modify some of the elements after your model has been upgraded. Namely you will need to:

• Modify the URL of the web services
• Modify the URL of the embedded opendocument calls
• Modify the models

I can’t say that these changes are completely unexpected, but it unfortunately these changes will need to be part of a manual process. I think that part of the problem is that we haven’t integrated Xcelsius into any type of structured lifecycle management.

Modify the URL of the webservices

As I move my Xcelsius model from one physical machine to another, I had to go back into each Web Service and change the name of the machine it was pointing to. I also had an issue with my Universes. It appears that somehow, it lost track of exactly which universe I was pointed to (perhaps I changed the CUID during the migration to XI 3.0) so I had to manually edit each one and make sure it was working. In some cases, once I manually picked the right universe, the query still didn’t work. It would throw an error. So I discovered a special trick.

TIP: I found that when the system lost track of my universe I could click on the Show the option dialog… and it seems to fix everything. I think it realizes that the objects in the query are the same as the old universe and repoints the objects correctly.

I also found that you can no longer just copy the URL from the QaaWS administration panel and paste it into Xcelsius 2008. You need to actually click on the which shows you the definition. From there you can click on the WSDL link and it will reveal the correct WSDL “url”. You can see that the URL below contains the end-notation, ?def. The WSDL will be exactly the same but say ?WSDL.

Modify the URL of the embedded opendocument calls

Ouch – what a pain. In XI 3.0, they changed the location of opendocument.jsp from http://<hostname>:<port>/businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp to http://<hostname>:<port>/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp

This means you need to either create your own redirector logic on the application server, or rebuild all your opendocument URLs. I can’t say I’m too surprised (it changed from CE10 to XI to XIr2). It’s just that we now see customer’s using opendocument.jsp so much more because it’s a great way to integrate Xcelsius dashboards with Crystal Reports and WebIntelligence documents.

Modify the Models

So far I’ve not had too much trouble in moving my dashboards from Xcelsius 4.5 to Xcelsius 2008, however there are clearly differences in the way the product works. For example, I had a dashboard that did some lookups and returned zeros. In Xcelsius 4.5, when I used the option Ignore cells at End-of-Range option, it would ignore a text cell with the value 0 and a numeric value of 0. Now, it will only ignore the values in the column if they are truly blank.

I’m not saying the old way was right or wrong, it’s just that now the interpretation of “blank cells” has changed. It used to include cells with 0′s but now it really means only blanks.

Therefore – fair warning. When moving to Xcelsius 2008 you need to make sure and test each and every model to make sure it is still working in exactly the same way.

Conclusion

Overall, I love the new features of Xcelsius 2008. I love the fact that the worksheet is now integrated into the model and the updates to the model take place in real time, but expect a few bumps along the road. Like the fact that when you switch between Preview mode and the Normal mode, Xcelsius can’t seem to remember the sizes of the properties window on the right and the worksheet on the bottom-middle.

It always been a pet peeve of mine that when software installation programs assumes that you want to install it on the C:Program Files directory. How hard is it to create one more screen to allow the users to change the installation location?

Over that last two days I’ve been installing the new BusinessObjects XI 3.0 onto a test system and really enjoying working with the new software. Since I was involved in the pre-beta process, it was especially satisfying to see some of the changes that have been made since October 2007. Since I was not involved in testing Xcelsius, I’ve been really excited about getting my hands on Xcelsius 2008 and giving it a test run.

Today I installed Xcelsius 2008 and my pet peeve surfaced. Sure enough, I accept the license agreement; I put in my keycode; and the installation begins. What?@!? No chance to specify the installation directory? Well, since it was the last piece of software to be installed, perhaps it saw that I already had OTHER BusinessObjects software installed and so it rightly assumed that I would want to install it there. Nope. It assumed C:Program Files.

So what’s are you supposed to do? How do you get software to install somewhere OTHER than C:Program Files?

The answer is a little trick I learned while installing Crystal Enterprise at Coca-Cola. They too were adamant: No non-Windows OS software on the C Drive! In those days we had a problem with the installer. Even though you told it to install on the E: drive, it would still install 5 or 6 files on the C drive.

Here is the answer:

• We need to modify a registry entry. Now like anyone I need to say, don’t do this if you don’t know what you are doing
• Launch regedit
• Go to the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersion
• There you should find a subkey call: ProgramFilesDir. It should already be set to C:Program Files
• Modify the String value of this subkey to match your directory. In my case I wanted to install the Xcelsius under E:Business Objects, so I used E:
• Exit the Registry Editor
• Install Xcelsius 2008 (Reboot if necessary)
• Go back into the registry editor and change the value back to “C:Program Files”
• Reboot again (for good measure – gotta love Windows)

I found that Xcelsius 2008 asked me to reboot, so I did. When it came up the first time my system told me that one of my services didn’t start. I then changed the value back to “C:Program Files”, rebooted again and everything was fine. I don’t know if that will happen to you or not but that’s what I had to do.

Good Luck. Hopefully you’ll see the ability to specify your installation directory in a future release.

You gotta love Dilbert.

If you’ve not seen the latest version of Crystal Reports, then you might want to see what you are missing. The latest version of Crystal Reports (v13) is called Crystal Reports 2008 and started shipping earlier this month. Although there are a lot of great features in the product including:

• New Parameter Panel with optional Parameters
• Long awaited Cross-tab Enhancements
• Better Page Control for Web-based Reporting
• Salesforce.com and CrystalReports.com Integration
  

  

Favorite Feature in Crystal Reports 2008

Probably my favorite feature is the new Xcelsius and Flex Integration. It’s so cool. You can now take controls that are built using Xcelsius and the Adobe Flex environment and embed them directly into Crystal Reports. In fact as Xcelsius expands it’s support for Flex, we will be able to embed better looking, more dynamic and more powerful visualizations into Crystal Reports.

I have included a couple of sample Xcelsius pie charts that you can embed into a Crystal Report and then link to data using Crystal Reports 2008. You can download them here. This sample includes two Xcelsius swf objects and three Crystal Reports.

My Other Favorite Feature

Starting with version 9 of Crystal Reports, the software took on an annoying new habit. When you wanted to change the font or the font size, the cursor would insert itself into the field instead of highlighting the entire field, so when you started typing, it would INSERT a new value instead of allowing you to type over the value.

This viewlet will show you what I mean.

Well, this has been fixed in Crystal Reports 2008! I shared my feelings with the guys in development and they took care of it for me. Now when you change the font or font size it works just like MS Word or MS Excel. This is fantastic! Sometimes it’s the little things in life that give you the biggest joy.

Keep up the hard work guys!!