Business Views or Not?

[TheGoldMineGuru]

BOEXI on Win2003 Server (single proc) w/ SQL2000.

We have been debating our strategy for generating and deploying our reports. The sales pitch for Business Views are very catchy, but are they truly the way to go? We have a lot of reports that require the use of CurrentCEUserID, which corresponds to database records where that actual name is found in one of the fields (Account Manager). We also build most of our reports based on stored procedures so that processing is done on the server.

I cannot find decent documentation that really compares using BVs versus the traditional Crystal Reports designer way (if that makes sense). I'm hoping to gather some opinions from those of you with experience with BVs.

I appreciate it very much!

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
You do not need BVs to use the CurrentCEUserID ( or CurentCEUserName) as long as users have to log in and be authenticated.
They can be used in the selection formula for row-level security and can be used to Suppress for Field level..

BV's are useful but are proprietary and their format/usage may change over time (Companies do that, you know - remember Crystal Dictionaries? )

In most cases, Views or Stored Proceedures at the database end can do most of what BVs do...

Its up to you...



To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[TheGoldMineGuru]

Thanks for the info, Turkbear!

Going through the BVs, it does look like I can code that type of functionality in a stored proc. However, InfoView does not allow me to pass dynamic parameters (CurrentCEUserID) into the report. Their support, and posts on this forum have confirmed that. I imagine that passing the userid parameter directly into the stored proc would be more efficient than having the stored proc process all users and then rely on Crystal to filter records based on CurrentCEUserID. Even if we are hitting clustered indexes, it can take a long time for it to process.

I'm hoping I can figure this out with BVs capabilities. Our alternative is using the SDK. My only concern here is supporting that ourselves versus the out-of-box InfoView which is relatively easy to support and find support for.

Thanks again, I appreciate all the input and help you've given!

 

[cmmrfrds]

If you put CurentCEUserName in the select criteria of a report it can be passed to the database server. A couple of ways to make use of this on the server side are to either make a "linked server" to the Active Directory (provided there is sufficient information stored there like the account manager id along with the login), or create a table on the server with all the login names related to the ids. Then, you can just join this table in the queries to restrict to the CurentCEUserName.