Update / Refresh Excel as source for WEBI report and web services

[Former Member]

My organisation has some complex webi reports that we want to expose as web services for use with SAP Dashboards. Unfortunately these reports contain many variables, they are slow to load in WEBI (2-3 mins) and as a consequence retrieving web services, even for a pre-scheduled report can take between 1 and 60 seconds for a few rows of data. This is unacceptably slow.

It struck me that it would be quicker to:

1. Schedule the original report
2. Export it to Excel every night
3. Create a new webi report using above Excel as source
4. Export web services from the second report so it will be fast

There is some helpful information here (Microsoft Excel as data source for Web Intelligence) but I can't figure out how to refresh my report from a new (but identically named) Excel file each night. How do I do this? Where should I schedule the destination for my Excel file so that it can be picked up every night in the second webi report? Thanks

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.1 Support Pack 4 Patch 12

Version: 14.1.4.1772

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Jay,

You can make use of Event based scheduling have a look at below document.

Regards

Niraj

[sateesh_kumar1]

Hi Jay ,

I think the approach you are following is mostly work when we have a universe in between the scheduled excel and the webi.

schedule webi output with specified name to a share folder .

create ODBC , use that ODBC to create universe .

Create webi on newly created universe.

This will mostly work , but its not need . I would say

'use latest instance of the schedule document '

or.

'fine tune the database /original webi report to achieve the required performance '.

Thank you.

[Former Member]

Thank you for the helpful replies. I have now installed the webi rich client which is very useful. It allows me to create a new query based on a .txt file (not Excel file, although you can also do this). Each time I refresh the query in the rich client, it updates the report based on the text file. This is extremely useful.

The text file sits at the end of a network drive, which looks like \\myorg\shared\myfolder\myfile.txt

However, if I try to refresh my report from the web based webi (either html or java applet) I get the following error:

What do we need to do to allow the webi server (please excuse my simplistic terminology) to access the shared drive where my .txt file lives, so that the report can be scheduled to update every X hours? Currently I can't find any option to schedule a report from the rich client. Thanks

[amitrathi239]

check if BO admin user has access on this location.\\myorg\shared\myfolder\myfile.txt

Open the SIA and check the user name there and same user need the access to this location.

Once user get the access you will be able to run the report from BI Launch Pad.