Control the size of your Xcelsius dashboard in InfoView

If you ever tried to publish an SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius dashboard to InfoView by using the “Export” option to “Enterprise”, you surely ran into a sizing problem when viewing the dashboard. As the dashboard designer, you pay great attention to the dashboard canvas size and try to maximize each and every pixel on the canvas for optimized viewing and information delivery. However, when you go to open the dashboard you exported from to InfoView from within InfoView, you will most probably be surprised to see fonts reduced to sizes that make words illegible, components overlapping and other display problems. That is because InfoView opens the swf file you exported to the BusinessObjects repository without specifying the height and width attributes you created for your canvas. The swf scales to the user browser window size. It will likely be too small if opened inside the InfoView portal, or too big if opened in a separate window, and in either case, it will certainly not look exactly like you want it. So, what can you do? One work around you can use is provide you users a hyperlink objects inside of InfoView, rather than the actual swf object, as a way to open the dashboard. The hyperlink can direct the user request to a web page on the local BO server that will embed your dashboard with the proper dimensions, as well as handle the user authentication and embedding the user session token into your dashboard, in case you are connecting to a BusinessObjects universe via QaaWS or LO. You can follow the example below for the solution implementation details, this example is based on a BO system deployed using the standard Tomcat app server on windows.

  1. Create a directory inside the InfoViewApp web app directory to house the files you will create to redirect the user request and open your dashboard file. For example create a directory called dashboards in the InfoViewApp directory, like so: Tomcat55webappsInfoViewAppdashboards
  2. In this directory, you will host three files:
    1. an html file that contain a simple javascript command to open a new browser window. This is the file you will create a hyperlink to in InfoView. Its purpose is to guarantee that the dashboard will open in a new window, regardless of the user viewing preferences in InfoView.
    2. a .jsp file that will “harvest” the user session token, pass it to the Xcelsius swf file, and open the swf file using the width and height specifications you used in your canvas
    3. the actual Xcelsius dashboard swf file
  3. Finally, create a hyperlink in InfoView to the html file that will “popup” the dashboard in the desired size. You can use a relative url in your hyperlink (for example: ../../InfoViewApp/dashboards/pop_dashboard.html) which you can migrate through the import wizard without needing to change a host name on the server you will migrate this link to.

You can download an example, here. In the example, I also added the javascript to resize the dashboard, so not only it will always open in the correct size, users with larger screens can resize it if they wish (as described in this post). To use the example, extract the .zip and place the files in the directory you create in the InfoViewApp folder in step 1.

You can also download an example for adding a resize function to your dashboard here.

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8 Responses to Control the size of your Xcelsius dashboard in InfoView

  1. Jorge Aguirre says:

    Hi Ron. I’m trying to dowload the sample files but it seems that the link is broken. Can you please let me know ehere I can get them?
    Thanks in advance

  2. Vlad Desansky says:

    Thanks Ron, I have it now. Will try it and let you know my experience

  3. Vlad Desansky says:

    Hi Ron,
    for some reason I can’t download sample files, but
    I really interesting to try it. Can you please let me know how can I get them?

    • Ron Keler says:

      Vlad, thanks for your note. I post my files on Google docs. I just tried the link from this post and it stopped working in did. I am not sure why yet. I will post the solution as soon as i get this fixed. Thanks – Ron

    • Ron Keler says:

      Vlad, i did some more checking, and it looks like a browser/os compatibility issue with google docs. I am able to download the files from the post links using IE 7 and Firefox, but not IE 8 on Vista 64 bit. I am still looking for a solution, but in case you are interested, i suspect any other browser but MS IE 8/9 should work fine with google docs…

    • Ron Keler says:

      Vlad, i finally found a good free and simple hosting service where i can store my downloads. The link from this post will work fine now on any browser. Thanks again for your note! – Ron

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