Recently, I got the chance to break some new ground. Very exciting since I used to do this weekly and now it’s more like annually. Business Objects has the ability to provide web services to report data. With Xcelcius to create the pretty bar graphs and pie charts this results in simple dashboard like summary of data that just about anyone can understand. Data like what are the most likely body parts injured, how much do those injuries costs, and what are the most expensive claims on those injuries.
The design flaw in Business Objects toolset for making these web services is flexibility in copy a query from one database, called a Universe (someone’s got a big head), to another database. Each customer is in their own database. So, we want to copy a standard set of queries from the Demo database to the Client’s database. The Business Objects tool makes you rewrite the web service when you move it from between databases.
This can be a time consuming process. Let’s say you have a dozen queries for a client. It takes 5 minutes for each query. And you sign up 50 clients. 12 X 50 X 5 = 60 hours. This is Development’s time and excludes errors, which would take hours more. So, nice feature, but not production ready.
Let’s say you could copy a query from one database to another in 5 seconds and use a tool that anyone can manipulate. Now, it takes 60 minutes of a Business Admin’s, Project Management’s, Customer Service implementor’s,.. time.
That’s the tool. How to copy a Business Objects Web Service query from one Universe to another.