Panorama Business Intelligence

In some of our projects, we develop the Panorama views in the development environment along with the Data Warehouse, the ETL, the Cubes, etc. That’s because the customers want to see how their product will look like before we deploy the views in the production environment. So, how do you deploy Panorama views from one environment to the other?  

1. Create the new book – If it’s a new briefing book, create it using the Panorama NovaView Administrator program. If it’s already exist you can skip this step.
2. Copy the content – The book’s content is by default in c:\PanoramaFolder\E-BI\books\BookName. Copy the content of this directory from the dev machine to the production machine. This is not enought because the views are still looking at the dev environment, so:
3. Change the view’s properties – You need to have a very simple program (let’s call it PanoramaDeployUtil) that iterates over all the views in the given folder (and its sub folders, recursively) and change its properties. I recommend opening the view’s file using xml reader and change the element \pnView\Root\Cube\Properties. You need to set its properties CubeAddress, CubeName & CubeDB according to the new environment’s values (CubeAddress is the server address). Just run this program and the views will look at the new environment.
4. Check – check yourself and make sure everything is ok by opening Panorama Web Access or Panorama Desktop and see that the values shown are the production’s values.

Know that you can always open the Panorama Desktop and change the views one by one by hand.

Enjoy.