Feb 17 2016

“Working As Designed”

Categories: IDT,Rants Dave Rathbun @ 12:19 pm

Those three little words: “Working as designed.” I hate them.

I don’t know why it took me so long to experience this, as I found this topic on BOB that brought the issue to light years ago. That being said, here’s what’s going on…

In Universe Designer (UDT) a designer can change the state of an object from visible to hidden without impacting a report. I use this technique to create objects that have a specific purpose but keep them out of general circulation. For example, I will often create a class called “Report Objects” that contains objects with special exception handling or a unique purpose. That class is visible in the development environment only, which means my report developers have access to this class. Before the universe is migrated to the QA (and production) environments that entire class is hidden.

This allows me to create report-specific objects without risking an ad-hoc report using one of them incorrectly. It’s a great technique.

A secondary reason why I use the “hide” option is to retire old objects. I don’t want to break reports, but I don’t want any new reports to be created with these objects. Hiding them means existing reports continue to work.

In Information Design Tool neither of these strategies will work. Once an object is hidden, any report that includes that object fails. 👿 Based on information from SAP, that’s the expected behavior. They acknowledge that it’s a change in behavior, but so far I have not found the reason for the change. The bottom line is that it’s “working as designed” and will not be fixed.

Keep this in mind when you consider converting your UNV universes to UNX, as if you’re using the hidden object trick for any of the reasons I outlined above (or others that I may not have considered) that technique will fail in IDT.

8 Responses to ““Working As Designed””

  1. Comment by James Halligan

    Seems insane Dave…
    Hiding in IDT would appear to have no functional use. Given that there is no OOTB tool to assess the usage of universe objects in the underlying reports, this is actually a serious loss in functionality.

  2. Comment by anshuman

    welcome back after a long time 🙂 missed your posts ..

  3. Comment by Sachin Gupta

    Hiding future is working in IDT. I am able to run the old report after hiding the object as well.

    Version: SAP BI 4.1 SP5 FP6

  4. Comment by Dave Rathbun

    Just one more reason for us to get to 4.1 I guess. I’ll test this in our sandbox tomorrow, thanks for the note.

  5. Comment by Andreas J.A. (Xeradox)

    If I got a dime every time I hear the beloved phrase “works as designed” I’d be a wealthy man..

  6. Comment by Dave Cartwright

    Dave, did it work in your sandbox? Do we have a “works as designed” that works differently in two different feature packs without any acknowledgment of the change?

  7. Comment by ganesh

    thanks for the info. Need such posts further.

  8. Comment by Rob

    Better than “works as designed” is “works as coded.” 🙂