Webi report doesn't respect/reflect the display format in UNX universe (BO 4.1 SP5)

[mhmohammed]

Hello everyone,

I have this issue (as the discussion heading says) Webi report doesn't respect/reflect the display format I created in UNX Universe (BO 4.1 SP5 - IDT). Users need an object Reporting Month Year which they wanted to show as 'Mmm yyyy' (e.g. Sep 2015) in the report. So, I used the date field ('m/d/yyyy hh:mi:ss AM/PM') from the date dim (Sybase is our reporting database) and created a custom display format in the UNX Universe (IDT) to show as 'Mmm yyyy', but it's not reflecting in the Webi report, the 'Show Values' option in IDT shows the custom formatted values though.

FYI: Earlier, I created the Reporting Month Year object using the below formula, that doesn't help because, in the report we'll see it sorted Alphabetically (Apr 2015 will show on top instead of Jan 2015, and the users don't want to custom sort all the time or use date object in report and custom format all the time.)

dateformat(tablename.reporting_date,'Mmm') + ' ' + dateformat(tablename.reporting_date,'yyyy')

I see a KBA (snap below) where they say that this issue existed in BO 4.0 and was scheduled to be fixed in BO 4.0 SP2, 4.0 SP3 or 4.1, I don't know what's going on.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Mahboob Mohammed

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

you can try a solution at report side that is

1 - Create another variable [date to be sorted] = FormatDate([your date];"aaaaMM"),

2 - Add this variable to the block and sort by this variable;

3 - hide this column

Regards,

Rogerio

[mhmohammed · Accepted solution]

Hi Rogerio,

Thanks for the response. I already spoke with my users about this workaround, but I'm sure you know how some users are. They don't want any workarounds, they want to do everything the way they do in Excel. Also, this is for the ad-hoc reports that they'll be creating, so no point of creating variables in the reports as they want it to be as much drag and drop only as possible, and are not willing to create any variables, even with the simplest of formulas.

Thanks,

Mahboob Mohammed

Update: The custom display format seems to be working now, after republishing the universe a couple of times. I don't know and can't explain why it wasn't working earlier.