Webi enhancements in 4.0: dynamic chart titles and formula wildcard name searching

Web Intelligence has a lot of new features and capabilities that make life a lot easier for report developers. A couple that i ran across and thought were very useful are the ability to use a formula as a chart titleĀ and the ability to easily search for functions right in the formula builder in webi.
The first enhancement I mentioned above is long overdue and very helpful. In pre 4.0, webi charts could only be created with static titles. This could only be overcome by creating complex workarounds (like creating a single cell block with a formula, and using relative positioning to place it on top a chart to make it look like its title). Now, you can simply type the formula you want to use as the chart title. Nice.

The second tip, helps report developers navigate the formulas library in webi. When you open the Formula Editor and select the Ctrl and F keys on your keyboard, you will get a little “Search for:” tooltip on top of the formulas list. You can use a * character as a varchar to search for any formula that contain the word date or format in its name..

 

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5 Responses to Webi enhancements in 4.0: dynamic chart titles and formula wildcard name searching

  1. Susan Phillips says:

    Thanks Ron. At the moment our customer wants to burst to report directories and not email addresses, so I’m able to force two of the report columns to the username and email address. Then I use those to build the dynamic report name. I’ll look in to the BI Platform SDK.

  2. Susan Phillips says:

    Do you know if the dynamic chart title can then be used in Publication bursting to make the output file name dynamic? I can’t figure out how to do it in 3.1. For example: rpt1_state1_county1_city1.pdf; rpt1_state1_county1_city2.pdf, … Title is one of the output file name choices in 3.1 publication destination properties but I haven’t figured out how to do create the title dynamically within the webi report. I’m not sure what mohanraj meant by element linking. Thank you for your help.

    • Ron Keler says:

      Susan, i do not know of a way to display a report variable as the attached file name in a publication (when sending as attachment). However, you can use the %SI_DOCUMENT_HTML_CONTENT% in the email body to display the report itself, right in the email body, in the past i used that as a quick way for users to see the report, without having to open an attachment if they do not need to. Also, there might be a way to do this using the BI Platform SDK, i know publications are exposed in this SDK.

  3. Element linking in webi can make use of the dynamic chart title so well.

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