Running an Xcelsius dashboard within another application

[Former Member]

All,

We are looking at possible ways to integrate an Xcelsius dashboard within our intranet application. We are running Crystal Xcelsius 4.5 with BO XI R2. At this point, we have some pretty extensive dashboards that run off of QaaWS within InfoView.

Now, we want to publish one of the dashboards to our corporate intranet for a specific group of people to take a look at. The intranet application is based on MS Sharepoint. This particular dashboard brings in a lot of data and takes about 20-25 seconds to load within InfoView.

The data behind this dashboard does not change more often than once a month. So the idea is to have a local SWF copy of the dashboard right on the web server that hosts the intranet app. Also, instead of going through QaaWS, we thought it might make sense to have a local copy of the data behind the dashboard so it can just refresh off of that copy. This data could possibly be stored in XML or some other format. Since the data does not really change too often, we thought we can run a nightly batch job to run the SQL, get the data and dump it in XML or some other format we decide on. The data file can then be uploaded to the web server.

This way, we are hoping to gain on performance by not hitting QaaWS, and BOE in general for that matter. Keeping everything local to the web server (SWF and XML) will make it a lot more quicker, which is the main goal. But for this, we will have to make a copy of the existing QaaWS-based dashboard and modify it to map against and XML file. We are not sure how easy/difficult that will be, given that the dashboard is a slightly complex one.

Can anyone provide me any feedback on this approach and/or any better ways to achieve this? Any suggestions/comments are welcome!

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

We are not sure how easy/difficult that will be, given that the dashboard is a slightly complex one.

It should be pretty easy with the XML Data or XML Maps connection. Both link to .xml flat files, directly with XML Data and indirectly, via an Excel spreadsheet, with XML Maps.

Outside the normal Xcelsius workflow, the only point at which you'll generate more work is setting up the XML files (and the Excel files, if you choose XML Maps).

The performance gains should makeup for any extra work, and if you have a skillful developer, it should be fairly simple.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Javier,

Thanks for your inputs. Right now we are in the process of assessing the changes that will have to be made to the dashboard. I

n addition, capturing all the required data so that it can be pre-loaded into XML file(s) is also a challenge as we have to be very sure that we capture all the needed data. It is not so much of a problem with QaaWS because it basically runs a query at run-time to get all the data it needs to, so no worries about pre-loading ALL data that might be needed for drill-downs.

I guess we will just have to grab all SQL queries behind the dashboard from within QaaWS and fetch data within all the involved tables, without any conditions/parameters applied.

Cheers,

Sarang