Sep 25 2007

Dynamic Dates Part IV: Yearly Date Ranges

Categories: Dynamic Dates,Universe Design Dave Rathbun @ 4:18 pm

Last Time On This Subject…

This is the fourth in my series about dynamic date objects. The first three included objects for daily, weekly, and then monthly ranges. I am going to complete my collection of Oracle-based dynamic date objects by providing yearly objects in this post.
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Sep 12 2007

Dynamic Dates Part III: Monthly Date Ranges

Categories: Dynamic Dates,Universe Design Dave Rathbun @ 2:57 pm

Last Time On This Subject…

In the first post in this series I introduced the idea of dynamic date objects. The intent was to show how a universe designer can create dynamic date objects that can be used to schedule reports with a condition that changes over time. The first post covered the basic concepts and included “Today” and “Yesterday” dynamic date objects. The next post covered weekly ranges. In this post I will further extend the concept to monthly ranges. As with the other posts so far in this series I will be using Oracle functions.

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Aug 30 2007

Dynamic Dates Part II: Weekly Date Ranges

Categories: Dynamic Dates,Universe Design Dave Rathbun @ 1:10 pm

Last Time On This Subject…

In the first post in this series I set up both regular objects and predefined condition objects that were based on the Oracle sysdate pseudo-column. These objects were designed to be used for scheduling reports with date conditions while allowing the date range to move forward in time for each new execution of the scheduled report. For that article I only created objects for Today and Yesterday. Today 😉 I will provide some weekly date ranges with the help of a few Oracle functions.

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Aug 22 2007

Dynamic Dates Part I: Yesterday and Today

Categories: Dynamic Dates,Universe Design Dave Rathbun @ 11:05 am

Hitting a Moving Target

Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so I can’t imagine why…

With apologies to the rock group Chicago, but I could not help starting out this post with a quote from one of their most famous hit records. Yeah, I have records. Deal with it. 😛

I am going to start out this post with a very obvious statement. There are two ways to get reports: Interactive and Scheduled. Interactive reports can have prompts that allow me to specify which values I want to see, and many times those prompts will include dates or date ranges. Since they are interactive I can change the dates each time I run the report.

But what about scheduled reports? I would hardly want to schedule a report that always ran for August 22, 2007, right? I want that date parameter value to change. Maybe I want the report to always run for “yesterday” or “last week” or “the second Tuesday of the month” or anything along those lines. The challenge is, of course, that the value for “yesterday” changes each day I run the report. How do I hit that moving target?

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Aug 03 2007

Designer SQL Traps

Categories: Fan / Chasm Trap,Universe Design Dave Rathbun @ 9:06 am

Designer is one of my favorite parts of the Business Objects product suite. I enjoy creating universes and solving the challenges that occur during that process. If you have worked with Designer yourself then you probably know that there are several different types of challenges that occur fairly frequently… so frequently, in fact, that we have names for them. They are Chasm Traps and Fan Traps. I plan to describe each of those traps in this post. I will provide various different solutions (some standard, some not so much) for each in future blog posts.

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