Hardly Working? No, Hard at Work on the Query Builder Guide
I feel I owe a small explanation for the lull in the new article publishing on the site. I have remained active at responding to article comments, but I haven’t published a new article in nearly a month (although I just added some details to the latest article on BO XI 3.1 Fix Packs). Anyway, I have been busy on BusinessObjectsTips.com topics, this is sure!
I have been working on a big update to our popular Query Builder guide. As many of us have discussed through email, I have been updating the guide, originally written based on BO XI R2, to include all of BO XI 3.1 new functionality. All of the XI R2 functionality still works perfectly in XI 3.1, but XI 3.1 brings some exciting new stuff like “Path Queries” and “Relationship Functions”. Writing and testing out examples always takes more time than I estimate, as also does my day job and personal life 
. I hope to finish and publish it, the new guide version, not my personal life, by the end of this month. Of course, as always you can find the guide here (link) and as always this new version will be made available freely to all previous Query Builder customers.
OK, back to work now. Thanks for your patience.
[UPDATE - March 6, 2010]: I have just published the promised guide update. Please see my new posting “New Query Builder Guide Version Published – Includes XI 3.x Updates and Relationship Functions“
Have You Heard of Path Queries in Query Builder?
Did you know that there is a tweak that you can do to your Business Objects server’s Query Builder main page “query.jsp” so that it can handle “Path Queries”? Do you know what a “Path Query” is? Do you know why you should care about “Path Queries”?
I was originally introduced to Path Queries by a posting at an SAP Business Objects Blog on the topic by Ted Ueda. The article got me really excited to try out this new syntax and seemingly simpler method of querying my CMS metadata.
Path Queries are very different from SQL queries and they are basically written like this path://InfoObjects/Root Folder/My Folder/*. This simple example would return all of the objects in the “My Folder” folder. Cool, huh?
Path Query syntax actually gets a lot deeper. It allows you to specify relationships between objects (the above example defaults to a parent-child relationship), specify filters, sort order, and they can even function as a kind of sub-select. For example, returning all groups for which the user Administrator is a member.
If you would like to learn more, keep an eye out for future articles on Path Queries or better yet, get your hands on our popular “Query Builder Guide” which completely explains Path Queries and the exciting SQL “Relationship Queries”.
