BI Web Services(BIWS) key parameters and its usage in Dashboards.

Hi All,

I am writing this document to provide some insight to all the users who are creating or plans to create Dashboards based on BIWS. BIWS is a very popular connection with Dashboards today and lot of users are making use of this to build their dashboards.

BIWS has some of the great features as compared to Live Office and QAAWS(Query as a Web service). With BIWS, we have options to get data from scheduled instances of reports, refresh on demand, get specific block of data from a report etc.

In this article, I would be highlighting some of the key parameters which is widely used. This should help in understanding the parameter well and also some tips on how best to make use of each parameter.

To begin with, lets consider below Input parameters of BIWS which are widely used:

ResetState: When this is "True", It will retrieve the data from the last updated and saved state of the webi document.

Refresh: When this is True, it would refresh the document from database and Web services would fetch the data from updated document.

getFromLatestDocumentInstance : This option is to retrieve the data from the last schedule instance of the document. **

getFromuserInstance: This option is similar to above but user specific.

** Talking about getFromLatestDocumentInstance option, we have seen multiple issues where different users complained about this option not working as expected.

This option works for both (publication & document) and will retrieve the last instance among the document and the shortcut inside of publication.If there is more than one document to schedule to the same destination I think it’s better to use publication, and add those documents in the publication.

I will explain the exact workflow for this option to work correctly using Publication with an example below:

1. Create a report on efashion or any universe.
2. Create a new publication on the report created (Enterprise Recipient: Select User Group, Destination: Default Enterprise Location and BI Inbox).        For 'Show options for selected Destinations’ select BI Inbox and enable Send As Shortcut.
3. Publish the report block as a web service.
4. Create a dashboard using the WSDL URL obtained.
   • In Dashboards use the QAAWS option to call the webservice .Use Get method.
   • Map or enter the credentials.
   • In connections have set getFromLatestDocumentInstance and GetFromUserInstance to True.
   • Set Refresh before Components are loaded.
   • Map the output.
   • Rest all are the default options.
5. Schedule the publication.
6. View the instance from BI Inbox and the result in the dashboard. It should be same.
7. Now change the data in db.
8. Schedule the publication again and view the instance in Inbox ,also view the dashboard.

The other parameters should be kept to default.

Also, when working with prompts, we see"Index" and "Operators" as one of the input values.

"Operators": It generally accept the values like "=,<>,IN".

"Index": It doesn't need any inputs for UNV/UNX.

** Another common thing I have noticed is users making use of " getFromLatestDocumentInstance" and " ResetState or Refresh" together. This does not make sense as the whole purpose of getFromLatestDocumentInstance is to avoid dbase refresh and use the data from the scheduled instance. You should avoid making use of both these parameter to TRUE at same time.

Hope this helps. Feel free to suggest or add in your comments or queries.

Thanks,

Amit