No diagrams in WebI (and publication)

No diagrams in WebI (and publication)

BusinessObjects 4.0 Web Intelligence

Instead of the diagrams just an empty space appears in your report

I created a publication, that ran about 1 hour and sent quite complex reports to some recipients. Sometimes the reports (in my case the format was pdf) contained no diagrams. The publication didn't show any error, it ended with status "successful".

In my logs I could find the error

ERROR:repeng:Created xblock instance is UNVALID

To solve that issue I had to increase the following two parameters of my Visualization service:

• Visualization Engine cleanup timeout(in seconds)
• Visualization engine swap timeout(in seconds)

After restarting the Visualization services, the problem was solved.

BusinessObjects: Public Folder doesn't open in Launch Pad

When you try to open the Public Folder in Launch Pad and it doesn't expand

BusinessObjects 4.0 LaunchPad

I didn't find a real solution for that problem on the internet, so I want to share how to solve it here. In my case it happened on a BO 4.0 platform but may be valid for other versions as well.

When I tried to open the Public Folder in Launch Pad, I just saw the waiting symbol, but it didn't open.

It was a long way to find out that that problem is related to the language settings of the installation. One quick workaround for the problem would be to change the language settings of your browser by adding the language of your BO installation in your settings and rank it to the highest position.

In my case I had to add the English language to my Language Preferences as you can see in the screenshot.

But of course that's just a quick workaround, that can be done from the client.

To solve the problem I had to look into the language directory of the BO installation. I found there two files for crystalreports: one for german (DE) and one for english (EN). I had to delete the german one to have consistent language files in the directory. After restarting tomcat the public folder should show up.

WebI: Report Filter not working

If you use a report filter in Web Intelligence and no data is shown, although it matches the filter condition

SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence - all versions

The problem might be that your text contains invisible special characters like new line. These characters are not working with report filters, you don't get any data in that case.

I remove those special characters in the database layer/semantic layer and replace them with a space (' ') - character. For Oracle Databases your SQL statement could look like this:


REPLACE (
             REPLACE (REPLACE (description, CHR (10), ' '),
                      CHR (13),
                      ' '),
             '   ',
             ' ')
             AS description

WebI: Show all months whether they have data

Sometimes you want to display all values of a dimension in your report, even when there is no data inside

SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence - all versions

In WebI you can of course only show the data, that you retrieve from your query. That means, when you want to display your measures based on months in a diagram, you will see only the months on your x-axis you get from your query.

Because that doesn't look very nice, I use the following very simple method to always show all 12 months of a year.

I create a new query in the query panel with two simple dimensions inside: YEAR, MONTH.

Afterwards you can merge those dimensions from the Query 'Date' with the YEAR and MONTH dimensions from your original query. When you use the merged dimension in your report, it will always show all 12 monnths.

Crystal Reports 2008: Dimension returns only "Selektion X" descriptions

Why a SAP BW dimension shows only Selektion X - placeholder descriptions instead of the correct dimension values.

SAP BusinessObjects 3.1, Crystal Reports 2008, BusinessObjects Integration Kit for SAP, BEX Query

It took me days to solve the following problem, so I want to share a solution if someone else has the same issue.

In my case the problem occurred, when I wanted to access with Crystal Reports 2008 via the BusinessObjects Integration Kit for SAP a BEX Query using a SAP BW MDX Query-Connection. When I used the query objects in my report, instead of the actual dimension member descriptions, I just got the placeholder-descriptions “Selektion 1”, “Selektion 2”, etc. When I opened the same query in SAP, it showed the correct values.

When I looked at the connection string Crystal Reports was using, I saw the parameter “LANG: DE” therein, which means, that it tried to query a german version of the dimension values. As there was only an english version defined, it returned those “Selektion X” descriptions.

I could not find out how to change that language-parameter directly. But finally I found the configuration file "DefaultMapping.properties“ in the folder “PVLMapping” of the Integration Kit for SAP. There you can define a mapping between system language codes to SAP language codes. I mapped the german language codes to english SAP language codes (de=EN, etc.), which changed the LANG-parameter in the connection string to “LANG:EN” and made the correct dimension decscriptions appear.

Set Line Color in Web Intelligence 4.0 Chart

How to individually specify the color of data series in a Web Intelligence 4.0 chart.

SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 FP3

In FP3 SAP added an urgently needed feature to Web Intelligence 4.0 charts. It is now possible to change the color of the lines not just according to a predefined color schema. To my mind that new feature is well hidden in the Web Intelligence 4.0 user interface.

You don't find it in the property window of the chart. Instead you have to select the data series in the chart legend or the line itself. Then you can change the color by chosing the background color in the Format-tab.

Change Universe in SAP BusinessObjects 3.1

"Some objects are no longer available in the universe. See your BusinessObjects administrator. (Error: WIS00001)(Error: INF)"

SAP BusinessObjects 3.1

When you want to replace the universe, which is used in a Web Intelligence report by a new universe, you might get the error message "Some objects are no longer available in the universe. See your BusinessObjects administrator. (Error: WIS00001)(Error: INF)" even when all the dimensions and measures definitely exist in the new universe.
The reason is, that sometimes Web Intelligence doesn't use the object names to reference dimensions and measures of a universe, but it's own internal object ids. These object ids are not visible for the user, but when creating a new object in the universe, a new object id is created automatically.
To overcome the error in Web Intelligence after changing the universe, the only solution I have found is not to recreate the objects in the new universe, but to use the existing universe with the existing object ids and replace the SQL query in the properties. This way the object ids remain and the Web Intelligence report can reference the objects correctly.