Reporting Remix #2
The weeks seem to be blending into each other. It seems like it was just yesterday when I put up my last post. Well it was a week ago today and this is what I have learned.
Web Service Connection:
I want to say that the more I learn, the less I know. Over the weekend is about the only time I have to work on projects of any sort. So I dedicated this weekend to learning about the connection types I had promised in last week’s blog. I started by creating a new Dashboard and my first Web Service Connection. The first parameter in the dialog box was to enter the WSDL URL? Huh? A WSDL or Web Service Definition Language as I come to understand it is a XML document that defines web services as collections of network endpoints, or ports. This in its simplest form allows communication between the message (request), service (WSDL) and the source. OK, cool so what is this good for?
So out on the internet I went to look for WSDL URL’s and what I found was a service (WSDL) that retrieved the current bid information for an EBay item. So what can I do with this? Well it would be cool for me personally but what about a real business application? That is when I came across the currency converter. Again I asked myself what practical application can I use this new found toy?
I took a break and walked my dogs to let things stew for a while. Then it came to me, how about a Dashboard that helped an international business decide when to buy a particular product or good from a country based upon the exchange rate?
So I went through the relatively simple exercise of creating the Web Service Connection. In the WSDL URL I entered http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx?WSDL and selected import. Voila! OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but it was nice.
In the Input values side I selected From Currency and the Read From became active. I bound this to a range of cells in my worksheet. I did this again for the Output Values and bound a similar range next to the Input range.
I won’t bore you with the other details, but instead I will publish my Dashboard this weekend after it’s cleaned up. What I will tell you is that the Dashboard allows my fake business to see where they can buy their fake products the cheapest based on the current exchange rate.
Query as a Web Service (QAAWS)
So when I told you last week that I was going to look into QAAWS I had no idea that it was nearly identical to Web Service Connection. Honestly, I was not trying to cheat and kill two birds with one stone. So I took my dogs for another walk. I realized during my walk that the main and most important difference is that QAAWS is used so that you can talk to your Business Objects environment.
We use QAAWS to populate a Server Health dashboard. This Dashboard was created by my co-workers Tina Robertson and Sridhar Rangabhashyam. She created the code to extract Server Health information from our various BO Environments. Tina Robertson created the Universe and Dashboard. In the end we have a single view of the health of our various BO environments. For those Administrators out there wouldn’t it be nice to look at a dashboard and only have to worry about yellow or red indicators instead of looking at the individual health indicators in every system?
This was accomplished by installing the Service in the BusinessObjects environment and establishing a reference to a BusinessObjects Universe. The URL that is created now becomes the WSDL URL used the values needed for my Query as a Web Service Dashboard connection.
Centigon GMaps
I told you last week that it was a last minute dash to put in a map in my Charity Dashboard challenge. I looked at the various options that are out there and found that Centigon’s GMaps was the easiest to use right out of the box.
I wanted to add some more “WOW” to the functionality of the GMaps but ran out of time. So when I talked with the Founder and CEO Ryan Goodman I told him about some of the things I wanted to but could not because of time. Ryan told me about some of the example Dashboards they have on their website that showcased some of the various solutions they had.
One thing I wanted to do was put the Client information in Rows not a continuous string. Ryan told me that I could use HTML code for a hard coded return to achieve this.
Second, I wanted to either launch a new Dashboard or report. Again, I can imbed either the Open Document call from BusinessObjects or just a simple hyperlink to maybe the Client’s website?
The third thing I talked about was why couldn’t I just use a street address and have GMaps find the coordinates. Ryan paused a moment and said that it already does that. Boy did I feel dumb. I had gone out iTouch Maps and put in several client addresses, got the latitude and longitude and placed this information in to Excel, bound the cell to the map….. You see where I am going. I did all the work that was already built in to the product.
This last topic started me thinking about how I can bring this in to my work and drive business. So for those managers or business analysts out there pay attention. We now have two great tools, Dashboard Designer and GMaps. We can connect to our BusinessObjects environment through QAAWS to retrieve Sales data, we can display the data in GMaps with location pins set with threshold values to visually alert us when conditions are met. You can now look at a map and see if a certain area is affected that might indicate a trend or problem. Personally I think this beats just running a report, creating an alerter, grouping the stores based upon the alerter and then trying to figure out of they are located near each other or in a particular sales area.
All in all it was a productive weekend. The dogs received a lot of fresh air and exercise. I learned that I need to continue to challenge myself outside of work to keep relevant and bring value to what I do and my community.