What is a Universe Overload?

What a cool and confusing name!

I have to admit that the name “Universe Overload” tends to send my imagination going to exciting science-fiction worlds and different dimensions. I think the person that coined the phrase must have chosen it for that reason, because for me it does not seem to represent. To calm my imagination and to help the phrase prompt more appropriate understanding I tend to replace the word “Overload” with “Override”. In general, “Universe Overloads” override the default restrictions placed on the universe objects.

Then what are “Access Restrictions”?

Prior to BO XI 3, “Universe Overrides” were called “Universe Overrides”. In Business Objects XI 3.1 “Universe Overrides” we renamed (like so many other things) “Access Restrictions”. The incremental boringness of this new name is off-set by an equal increase in the descriptiveness of the name. “Universe Overrides” or “Access Restrictions” are simply object restrictions, table mapping, and row restrictions which are directly added to a universe.

How can I add or modify a Universe Overload?

You can modify/view these “Access Restrictions” by opening the universe in Designer. Then select Tools > Manage Security… > Manage Access Restrictions. Nevertheless, if you did not know that already then you will need more than this brief article to get you safely going into the exciting and futuristic world of “Universe Overloads”.

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9 thoughts on “What is a Universe Overload?

  1. Hi Julian,

    How are you.

    Long time since I responded to any article. I came across the word “Universe Overloads”, when I was using the Import Wizard. Later on I came to know thats its same as Universe restrictions. I dont know if you noticed or not, when you import a Universe with restrictions and try to “Save As”, the group assigment of each restriction will disappear. We have to again reassign the restrictions to each group.
    Since I was mentioning about the import WIzard, I have something in mind to ask. What are these repository objects? In case we dont import it along with reports/universes will there be any issue?

    Thanks

    Aravind

  2. I like to believe that if I don’t know what it is than I don’t need it, but in this age of technology and technological abstraction that is an impossible way to live. Therefore, I asked the same question once as well.

    Answer: I seem to recall that I was told that repository objects are all object related to the report that is not an instance, user, group, universe, or folder. I was told that most BO shops don’t usually use these. Right now, I can’t seem to think of what they are though. 🙂

    BTW, Save As for any universe or report will create a new CUID for the object and you are right, in doing this, certain relationships are lost. Those being universe overloads and universe to report associations.

  3. @Aravind:

    I agree with Julian, Repository Objects are those objects related to reports. These are nothing but image files (.bmp, .gif, .jpeg etc.) that are used on reports like crystal.

    For example, If you have a report that generates letters to certain customers, and per the business need every letter sent to customers has to be signed by a management personal. If you want thousand’s of letters that you want to sent, it is not realistic to sign those letters by managers/management personnel individually one by one. To make this task easy you can generate an image file (signature of the manager) and add it to your crystal report and export to BO Enterprise.

    Moreover, when you actually move these kind of reports(objects) that have these repository objects from DEV to PROD environment, then it is necessary to import these objects as well.

    Irfan

  4. Hi,

    shall we have one to one and many to many join cardinality in a universe ???
    If yes or no please give reasons….

    Regards,
    Ramanathan

  5. Hi,

    What are the ways to increase the performance of the report?

    At universe level and at report level what has to be done?

    Regards,
    Ramanathan

  6. Hi Ram, thanks for the questions. They are quite a bit off of the topic of this article and so I will try to answer them with a new article which I will try to publish soon. In the future, please email me any off-topic questions unless they are related loosely to the articles topic. I just want to keep the content of the article comments relevant to the article for the benefit of all.

  7. HI,

    We are having objects like “Average Handle Time”, “Average Wait Time” in Universe. The data type of these columns is “time” in data base(SQL Server 2008) in the format hh:mm:ss, But in our universe I don’t find the time data type. We are using XI3.1

    I tried with all the types available in universe, but no use of them. Please suggest me how I can do this.

    Thanks in advance.
    Surekha

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