Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Starting with BI Workspaces

Workspaces are a unknown part of the BusinessObjects environment and maybe also an underestimated part, Workspaces are created in the BI Launchpad. They can be used as landing page or they can be opened from the launchpad manually.
What I am going to show here is how to build a very simple workspace with templates.
Open the workspace editor using the Application menu in the BI Launchpad.


Click the layout dropdown box and change to Freeform.


On an empty workspace drag in a navigation list component.


Edit it using the wrench symbol in the top right corner and select 2 webi report. Or drag and drop 2 webi reports on the navigation list.


There it is, it’s done. Your first workspace. Now you can save it and execute it from the BI Launchpad. You do not have to save it, exiting edit mode gives you a change to test the new workspace.

When you click 1 of the reports on the navigation list, by default, the report runs it the total workspace window. Click the square symbol on the left side to return to the navigation list.




And when the other report is clicked:



If you want to run the webi report in a part of the workspace window, you need to drag in a viewer component.  No configuration is needed, the are connected automatically.




Click one of the reports:


And click the other report:


If there are multiple navigation lists and multiple viewers on the workspace some configuration is needed.




I named the viewers top and bottom (using the edit / wrench of the viewers).




Then I connected each navigation list to a specific viewer. (using the edit / wrench of the navigation lists).