CenterView Business Objects: 1

CenterView Business Objects

About This Document

Welcome to Corda Technologies' CenterView tutorial. The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to use
the datafunnel wizard to query your Business Objects Universe and fill a new datafunnel with the query
results from Business Objects.

Creating a New Datafunnel

1. Simply click the “Add a new DataFunnel (.dfxml) File” button ( ) to show the Datafunnel Wizard.

2. On the first page (“What is your Datafunnel name?”):

• Enter a good name describing the data this datafunnel will contain.
• Leave use the wizard to create a Datafunnel selected.
• Click Next.
3. On “Where is your data?”:
• Select in a Business Objects Universe.
• Click Next.

Connecting to your Business Objects Server

Before connecting to your Business Objects Server you'll need to know the following:

• The Business Objects CMS (Central Management Server).

• The Username and Password for connecting to the Business Objects CMS.
• The Authentication (Enterprise, LDAP or WinAD).

CenterView Aliases are handy for remembering the connection information for you, and those working
with your dashboards. You can either create and use a CenterView Alias, or enter the settings directly
into the wizard. Entering the settings directly is not covered in this tutorial.

1. In the datafunnel wizard, on “What are your Universe settings?”

• Select the top radio button Alias.
• Click the ... button (ellipses) to the right of the Alias drop down box. This will display the “Configure
Aliases” dialog.
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2. In the “Configure Aliases” dialog:

• Click New to create a new Alias.
• Change the default name from New Alias to something that will describe this Business Object's
connection (for this tutorial, use “eFashion”).
• Enter your CMS, Username and Password.
• Select your Authentication Type (Enterprise, LDAP or WinAD).
• Click the Test button to test the connection information. (If you get an error, correct the connection
information and test again).
• Click Save to save this new CenterView Alias.
• Finally, click the Close button to close the Configure Aliases dialog.
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3. Continuing with the “What are your Universe settings?” Wizard page:
• Drop down the Alias drop down box, and select your new CenterView Alias, named “eFashion”.
• Click Next.
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Selecting a Business Objects Universe

The “Which Business Objects Universe” Wizard page will show a large white box. If this box has a
single gray line of text that states, “Gathering data from server...”, then wait briefly while CenterView
collects the available Universe names from the Business Objects server.

1. After the box has been filled in with the available Universe names, click on the Universe you want to
get your data from, and click Next.
2. For this tutorial, select the “eFashion” Universe.
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Building the Query

The “Select your query parameters” Wizard page allows you to build your Business Objects query for the
selected Universe. The following image shows this Wizard page:

The interface for building a query against the Business Objects Universe is similar to the Business
Objects Web Intelligence (WebI) interface. You can access dimensions (blue squares), measures (purple
circles), details (green diamonds) and predefined conditions (yellow funnels). If your query requires, you
can choose a query context for your query:
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Selecting the Result Objects

The Result Objects are the data that will be included in your datafunnel. If you are familiar with SQL, the
Result Objects are similar to the SELECT portion of the SQL. To include Result Objects in the query,
simply select objects from the tree (like “Store name” in the image below):
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And then drag it onto the Result Objects panel area and drop it, as shown below:

1. For this tutorial, drag “Store name” from the “Store” folder and drop it on the Results Objects pane.
2. Drag “Sales Revenue” from the “Measures” folder and drop it on the Results Objects pane. The final
Result Objects is shown below:

3. Now, you can check how well the Business Objects query is coming along by pressing the Preview
Query button ( ). You should see the bottom preview pane fill with a preview as
shown below:
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Building the Query Filters

The Query Filters will filter, or reduce, what data will be included in the datafunnel. If you are familiar with
SQL, the Query Filters are similar to the WHERE clause of SQL. To filter (or reduce) the query, drag
objects from the tree on the left into the Query Filters pane, just like with the Result Objects in the
previous section.

1. In this tutorial, you will filter the query to only include Stores that are in certain states. To do this, drag
the “State” object from within the “Store” folder and drop it on the Query Filters pane, as shown
below:
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2. In this tutorial, you will only select stores that are in the state of Texas. To do this, simply drop down
the list, as shown below, and select “Texas”.

3. Now, when you press the Preview Query button, you will see the preview below. Notice that this
time, there are only four rows, all from the state of Texas.
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4. You can change the “State” filter to include stores that are in several states by changing the
comparison from “Equal to” to “In list”. Click on the Equal to comparison to show the drop down
menu of choices, and select In list as shown below:
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5. Now, click on the ellipse button ( ) to show the “Select” dialog. You can easily add
another state to the query filter, by selecting the state in the Available Value(s) column on the left
side, and then clicking the Add >> button ( ). In this tutorial, you will add California to
the already selected value of Texas. Then dismiss the dialog by clicking OK.

6. Clicking Preview Query now will show the data results for additional stores in California.

Finishing

1. To finish this datafunnel, click Next to show the “Are you done?” Wizard page. A preview of the
datafunnel will be shown.
2. Clicking Finish will save the Business Objects datafunnel.

Editing Later

After the datafunnel is created, you can edit it later by right-clicking on the datafunnel and selecting Edit
using wizard..., as shown below:
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When you look at the Business Objects Universe datafunnel in Builder, its objects look familiar, because
they act just like the database and file datafunnels you are used to.