SAS 9.2 ... View more

You are correct. The content on my BI Server is order into three distinct folders: Development, Test and Production. It is very easy to promote content from one folder to another with the exception of web stored processes that utilize jsp pages to handle custom input parameters. In the current usage situation, it is necessary for us to modify the value that is hardcoded in the jsp to reflect the revised directory/program path. Ideally, we would like to define a stored process parameter in Management Console that is used to pass the correct path to the jsp. Is this feasible? ... View more

You are more than welcome and please continue to advocate this need with the development staff as it would be an incredible useful feature. We are moving our BI Server 9.2 into full production tonight and I had some freetime to look at the "under the cover" mechanisms that you reference and I see your point. It appears that you are using Dojo to generate a static graphic and then use the image id to associate data set values using the area attribute of the map tag. Very Cool!!! Downside is it seems that the current implementation does not support the ability to pass a custom style sheet that is associated with categorical data to the graphing engine. Anyway, have to get back to the server move. Many Thanks, JDMTX ... View more

Jenn2 wrote "Can you tell me how much of a need you have to be able to assign colors to categorical variables in charts and tables? Is there a critical need? " From my perspective, this is a high priority item based upon how my users create and read reports. We are a multinational company with operations in 90 plus countries and currently use custom color schemes for competitors, product categories and regions. The bulk of these reports currently reside in MS Excel and MS PowerPoint were the use fixed color schemes for categorical data enable users to rapidly review and interpret reports without having to refer to legends. Based upon how graphs are generated, I am surprised that it is not possible to create a custom style sheet that can be tacked onto the default theme and thus be used to override selected categorical values when graphics are rendered. To put this into context, I offer two examples: Think of cities being able to define their own custom colors for stop lights. It would not work because both the colors and position of the lights in the lighting unit have distinct universal meanings. You have three product lines and four regions yet in one of the four regions only two of the product lines are available. If a users puts the four graphs side by side in WRS it is possible for the slices of the pie chart to be different colors since the rendering engine is deciding what colors to use for you. ... View more

Can this same technique be applied to produce graphs as opposed to tables? Think a pie chart where each slice represents revenues by region and each region is typically assigned a fixed color. ... View more

I am extremely excited by your finding!!! It does bring a couple of questions to mind: 1. What is the practicality of assigning the colors to the categorical data via means of a format or macro? 2. What is the practicality of loading the assignment of colors into a support data set and join the support data set to the reporting data set via Information Map Studio? 3. Is it correct to assume that once data from the workspace server is handed off to the middle tier of a BI Server implementation that the rendering of the data into a report is exclusively handled by a Java application? If so this brings about interesting possibilities via the use of mods.... Many thanks and I look forward to reading about the solution in the blog!!! ... View more

The question is too generic as the question needs to be asked in terms of a user’s role and experience level (web report consumer, web report consumer/limited report modification ability, report designer, programmer and wrs administrator. My personal experience is that beginners and novices quickly grow into intermediate users when there is a compelling need to accomplish a task because management needs a report and the user is forced to get their hands dirty. Hope you did not mind me weighing in. ... View more

Wanted to thank everyone for their input and to provide some updated information/observations based upon some experimentation that I performed over the weekend. 1. The pivot table was supplied to me by one of the users that I support. 2. I rebuilt the pivot table field by field and forced a data refresh with each field addition to measure relative performance. 3. The performance issue in this case appears when a text field is added as a pivot table column label and other column labels already exist (year and quarter). 4. The text field contains roughly 51 unique values. 5. The bulk of the problem appears to be one of education as it is difficult for an end user to identify when the data has been extracted from SAS via the SAS Add-In for Excel and when Excel functionality kicks in. The user in question attributed to being a SAS issue and it was not. Overall, more than three fourths of the performance drag appears to be Excel having to generate an extremely large number of cell calculations. 6. I do want to state that when I dropped the data from SAS directly into a worksheet and built a pivot table off of the worksheet data, that the performance issue still existed but not to the extent that I encountered when I dropped the data from SAS directly into a pivot table. 7. This goes to show that a user really needs to know their data and what their asking of it when building a pivot table. I am definitely curious to see what type of performance gains could be made using an olap solution and keeping the data and calculations server side. Many Thanks, JM ... View more

Thanks for the assist and direction. I was afraid that this was the case but wanted to bounce the question to the community at large and to see if they had any ideas on the subject. It is unfortunate that the data format is locked down by Cognos and thus users have lost the abilty to interact with it in the analysis platform of their choice. Many thanks!!! ... View more