Designer: how to forbid some objects combinations ?

[Benouche]

Hello,

does someone know how / or if exists a possibility to forbid to make certain combinations ...*

for exemple, during utilisation in Reporter, after selecting an object, it will be impossible to select
another one which is incompatible.


Any idea ?

help hotly welcome,
Benouche.

 

[skrandel]

My question back to you is? Should objects that can't be used together exist in the same universe anyway?

What you've asked for my not be possible directly. Is there something you could do using a case statement or something else that could plug in some sort of dummy value so as to not get the "Incompatible combination" error? Steve Krandel
BASE Consulting Group

http://www.baseconsulting.com

 

[sriramna]

I had a similar problem which was neatly resolved using the @Aggregate_Aware BO function.

To answer why incompatible objects get into the same universe, here's my case: A small-budget purchase requisition system, where a number of departments have fixed budgets which they can consume over the course of the year. The universe facilitates listing umpteen details about the requisitions. The budget _utilised_ can be summed up from a value field available at requisition line level. There is also a summary table maintained having the fields "Budget Year", "Dept.", "Budgeted Value", "Budget Utilised" and "Budget Remaining".

The Budget Utilised field is an obvious candidate for Aggregate Awareness. However the other columns are obviously incompatible, since a Budgeted Value only makes sense for a given department or departments for a given year or years; there is no such thing as a budget for a given requisition.

I need to allow queries with the columns Year, Dept and Budgeted Value, but cannot allow any other columns in the same report because no other combo makes sense.

This was achieved by making each of these "Aggregate Aware" as in @Aggregate_Aware(BudgetTable) (without any lower-level aggregate tables) and selecting all but the relevant two columns as incompatible objects in Designer.

Worked like a charm!

 

[skrandel]

This is a good solution. The only downside is what it does to the users.

It certainly tells them when they have chosen incompatible objects. The only downside to this is that it doesn't tell them which ones are incompatible. So, if they've put 25 objects in the query, they won't know which ones are the problem.


Steve Krandel
BASE Consulting Group

http://www.baseconsulting.com

 

[blom0344]

Technically , it boils down to bad design from BO's part. These quirks are one of the reasons why BI tools are still considered to be too user-unfriendly. BO does provide a quick SQL glance to give reason to suspect incompatible objects , but there is no active feed-back to the user (so why not added this!).
Ideally, a universe should be dealing with this , but this would result in sets of sub-universes in many cases.

More modern BI tools like the recent Power-analyzer from Informatica are more elegant this way, though I still prefer BO for its allroundedness (is that english?)

T. Blom
Information analyst
tbl@shimano-eu.com