The Activity Universe

Some of the most common questions people ask themselves, can be solved quite easily, by using the Auditing universe by Business Objects themselves.

How long does a report take on average to refresh?
In which reports do we use a certain objects?
Maybe, when a report fails to refresh, you want to know about it?
Maybe, when a report runs a LOT faster than usual, you want to know about it?(because chances are, the report will be empty then)

That's when you use the Activity Universe.
...

The Activity Universe exists in every Business Objects Environment, but you need to have auditing switched on. Many environments do have this.

Ask about it to your local Business Objects Administrator :)

Peter

Linking universes

A customer asked me : how can I link two dataproviders if the common field has an un-equal number of digits.
In one universe, the customernumber is 6 digits, in the other 8 digits - the two digits are two leading zeroes, so the zeroes can be removed without problem.

The formula I used was :
=if(Length(<customernumber>8) then SubStr(<customernumber>,3,Length<customernumber>)) Else <customernumber>

inserted into the field where the customer number was, the leading zeroes would be removed and BO would automatically agregate the data.

there is an other solution, which would involve creating a user defined object on the universe, but this would render the documents unusable to colleagues on different machines.