In Business Objects how can I get a list of reports using a specific universe?
I have been asked the following related questions a few times in the past months and I thought it would be a good idea to post a public answer to them. First the questions:
- Is there any way to get a list of reports that are using a specific universe?
- If I change this universe which reports will be affected?
The Answer – Yes, Definitely, Using Query Builder
The short answer to these questions is “Yes, you can”. The slightly longer answer is, “Yes, this can be done through Query Builder, the BO Auditing data*, or through the Business Objects SDK.” For the purposes of this article, I will confine my further comments to the Query Builder and BO Auditing data solutions; the BO SDK solution requires a set of skills and even licenses that many BO Developers and Administrators do not possess.
I haven’t been keeping track, but I expect that those who have emailed me this question have not studied The Best Query Builder Guide Ever Written. I just wanted to point out that our Query Builder Guide answers these questions, and provides so much more.
The Resolution using Query Builder
For those of you familiar with SQL or just the concept of tables you might think that all you have to do is join up the record of the specific universe with all of the records of the reports where it is used. Well, this is partially true. Firstly, if you know something about query builder you know that reports and universes are stored in separate logical tables and you know that you can’t really join two tables together. The solution here is two part: (1) query the record for the specific universe retrieving all associated report IDs and then (2) query for for each of those report IDs to get the reports’ identifying information.
Query the Universe’s Reports
This is a straightforward query, but be careful if you do not have the universe’s object ID, because it is possible to have two universes with the same name and you wouldn’t want to get wrong data from the start. Here is the SQL statement you need to put in Query Builder:
SELECT
si_id,
si_name,
si_webi,
si_cuid
FROM
CI_AppObjects
WHERE
si_name = 'UNIVERSE_NAME' AND
si_kind = 'Universe'From this you will get some additional universe info and a list of all reports that are bound to this universe. Copy that list of report object IDs to a text editor and proceed.
Query the Report’s Identifying Information
Take that list of report object IDs from the previous step and parse the list so that each ID is separated by a comma. Then substitute that list for the string “111111,222222,33333 below in the SQL:
SELECT
si_id,
si_name,
si_universe,
si_cuid
FROM
CI_InfoObjects
WHERE
si_id IN (111111,222222,33333) AND
si_kind = 'WebI' AND
si_instance = 0The output should be your desired list of reports. Now that you see the “si_universe" property you might ask yourself why I don’t query the report table for my universe’s object ID. Good idea, but Business Objects’ Query Builder query language doesn’t yet support filtering on “property bags”, and si_universe, just like “si_webi” are property bags. They hold multiple values in a single property.
The Resolution using BusinessObjects Auditing Data
If you have enabled auditing on your environment’s report servers then you can look to your Auditing data for an answer to this question. However, auditing data is not meta data; it’s records are created as the objects are used. Therefore if a report is never used then it will not be present in this data set. If this is not a concern, or if you would like to know which reports have been used belong to a certain universe, then querying the auditing data is an option for you.
Querying the Auditing Records
There are many ways to mine this data source for the data you need. For most folks the best, easiest method is to use the “Activity” universe. Here you will find the objects you need. A tutorial on this universe and the auditing data is out of scope here, but I’d like to put together a guide on the topic if I hear of any interest. Another way to mine your data is directly against the database tables (these tables are not encrypted like the Business Objects XI CMS Infostore. This certainly allows for better query tuning, but it will increase the complexity for you. You could even use the SQL of a report created against the “Activity” universe as a starting point, but be careful as that universe is full of derived tables.
Final Thoughts
Both of these steps might seem difficult at first, but with a little practice you will find that you can whip out answers to these kinds of questions rather quickly. In fact, now you have the tools to answer the reverse as well: “How can I get a list of universe using a specific set of reports?”. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Querying the Busines Objects XI CMS InfoStore Database Tables
The question has come to my mind many times over the years and this month it has come to my inbox.
Thanks to Pluto for inspiring me to write this article.
The question: Is it possible to peer into the Business Objects XI CMS InfoStore (a.k.a. database repository) without Query Builder or the BOXI SDK????
The answer: No
All of my research and experience tells me the following:
Much of the meta data, the useful part especially, is stored in the CMS InfoStore in an encrypted binary format. No one has been able to decrypt this format yet, but I can’t really say that anyone has tried very hard. I certainly haven’t.
Some Things You Can Do with the CMS InfoStore’s Database Tables
The CMS InfoStore is mostly held in the database table named “CMS_INFOOBJECTS5″. Some other less significant data is held in the following tables: CMS_RELATIONS5, CMS_IDNUMBERS5, CMS_ALIASES5, and CMS_VERSION_INFO.
The structure of the CMS_INFOOBJECTS5 table in Oracle is as follows:
OBJECTID INTEGER NOT NULL,
PARENTID INTEGER NOT NULL,
TYPEID INTEGER NOT NULL,
OWNERID INTEGER NOT NULL,
LASTMODIFYTIME VARCHAR2(32 BYTE) NOT NULL,
OBJFLAGS INTEGER NOT NULL,
USERFLAGS INTEGER,
SCHEDULESTATUS INTEGER,
NEXTRUNTIME VARCHAR2(32 BYTE),
ALIASES RAW(255),
CRC VARCHAR2(32 BYTE) NOT NULL,
PROPERTIES BLOB NOT NULL,
SI_GUID VARCHAR2(56 BYTE),
SI_CUID VARCHAR2(56 BYTE),
SI_RUID VARCHAR2(56 BYTE),
SI_INSTANCE_OBJECT INTEGER,
SI_PLUGIN_OBJECT INTEGER,
SI_TABLE INTEGER,
SI_HIDDEN_OBJECT INTEGER,
SI_NAMEDUSER INTEGER,
SI_RECURRING INTEGER,
SI_RUNNABLE_OBJECT INTEGER,
SI_TYPEID_MACHINE INTEGER,
SI_KEYWORD VARCHAR2(255 BYTE),
SI_KEYWORDISTRUNCATED INTEGER,
LOV_KEY VARCHAR2(18 BYTE),
OBJNAME VARCHAR2(255 BYTE),
OBJNAMEISTRUNCATED INTEGER
The “properties”, “aliases”, and “objname” fields are where most of the goodies are to be found and these are the fields that are encrypted or in some way pretty much unusable to us without the SDK or Query Builder.
A New Hope for CMS_INFOOBJECTS5
Don’t completely give up on querying this table directly. There are still quite a few valuable data that can be retrieved from the table. Firstly, you should know that the following fields are indexed and there for with a large CMS InfoStore database you will want to use these for filtering your query:
PARENTID
OWNERID
TYPEID
LASTMODIFYTIME
NEXTRUNTIME
SCHEDULESTATUS
OBJECTID
SI_GUID
SI_CUID
SI_RUID
SI_INSTANCE_OBJECT
SI_PLUGIN_OBJECT
SI_TABLE
SI_HIDDEN_OBJECT
SI_NAMEDUSER
SI_RECURRING
SI_RUNNABLE_OBJECT
SI_TYPEID_MACHINE
SI_KEYWORD
SI_KEYWORDISTRUNCATED
LOV_KEY
OBJNAME (this is encrypted though)
OBJNAMEISTRUNCATED
Not all of these fields will have data, but some will and those that sporadically have data might meet your needs perfectly. I don’t really have a strong background in querying this table directly. So we are going to have to crack this nut together. Hopefully we can share our progress in the comments of this post and through updates from me to this article.
A Sample Use of a Direct Query on the CMS InfoStore
For example, I may want to extract a list of all si_cuid (the most unique identifier of an object) and objectid for objects that were created or modified on January 24th. To do this I would use the following query:
SELECT
objectid,
si_cuid
FROM
CMS_INFOOBJECTS5
WHERE
lastmodifytime LIKE ('2009 01 24%')
If you look to the table structure you will see that the field lastmodifytime is of a character type and therefore it can be queried as presented above.
Why would you want to do this query directly on the database and not in Business Objects’ Query Builder?
Short answer: performance and possibility. What I mean to say is that you can control more precisely the performance of the query you write against the table. In fact, a similar query done through Query Builder might perform so slow that you it would not be possible except if you ran it directly against the database table. The truth is that many valid reasons to directly query the database will still end up with you taking the output of that query and then running it through the SDK or Query Builder to obtain all of the properties corresponding to that output.
What other database tables can I query?
CMS_RELATIONS5 and CMS_VERISON_INFO seem to have the only other bit of useful data. CMS_VERSION_INFO has a single row with the repositories version info; I am not certain that you can detect service pack or fix pack level here, in fact, I think you cannot. The CMS_RELATIONS5 table seems to be interesting, but I have not come up with a useful reason to query it beyond tinkering.
For your reference the CMS_RELATIONS5 table has the following structure in Oracle:
PARENTID INTEGER NOT NULL,
CHILDID INTEGER NOT NULL,
ISMEMBER INTEGER NOT NULL,
ORDINAL INTEGER,
RELATIONSHIPID INTEGER NOT NULL
None of the data appears to be encrypted. It also appears to have almost a 1-to-1 ratio between its record count and the count of the objects in the repository as reported in Business Objects Central Management Console. The value of this table might increase if we were to discover the meaning of different relationshipid values.
Conclusion: Where do we go from here?
I feel that I have only given you enough information to advance your tinkering on the true back-end. Honestly, this is a new frontier for me. I hope to post more information here as I find the time to experiment with directly with the database or if I hear from anyone else that has experience they would like to share. I invite you to share your findings as you play with querying the database. Use BO Query Builder concurrently to help you understand more about what you are seeing. If you find you need some help with Query Builder then I do recommend that you take a look at our Business Objects Query Builder Guide
