Let’s say that I work in number of jobs. In every job I got some tasks that I need to do. The fact table looks like this:

Summarizing the “Tasks To Do” column will get the total tasks that I need to do. Summarizing the “Tasks Completed” column will get the tasks that I did. Note that in the Therapist job I didn’t get any tasks.
In the OLAP cube, I created a calculated measure which is the percent of the completed tasks (for every job or for any other dimension). The problem is: What is the answer in case that there are no any tasks to do? Some will say 0% and some will say 100%. That’s why a text measure such as “There are no tasks” can be a perfect solution for this kind of problem. This is the calculation of the calculated measure:

Create Member CurrentCube.[Measures].[Completed Percentage] as
IIF(IsEmpty([Measures].[Tasks To Do]),
null,
IIF([Measures].[Tasks To Do] = 0),
-1,
[Measures].[Completed Tasks] / [Measures].[Tasks To Do]
)
)
,format_string = “#,##0%;\T\h\e\r\e\ \a\r\e\ \n\o\ \t\a\s\k\s;0%”;

In the Panorama’s view, the format of the measure must be “General”. Otherwise, the view won’t show the format string with the text

One of the views in this page get two parameters from the web page (using Panorama’s SDK) – fromDate and toDate, which define a time interval for the view to slice on. After debugging, we’ve found that the problem was that after updating the fromDate parameter and before updating the toDate parameter, the view had no rows left. When trying to update the toDate parameters in the view with no rows, it made the browser stuck.

The solution is to make the parameters update in one action. There are two ways of doing this:

The first one is to use the CallUpdateParametersEx with number of parameters. You can update many parameters in one function call (look in the SDK documentation). The problem with this solution is that the code is not readable.

The second and better solution is to use the EnterBatchCommandMode and LeaveBatchCommandMode functions to make the parameters update in one transaction. This way, the code is much more readable. You can update every parameter in its own CallUpdateParametersEx call. The usage of this function is very simple: Call the EnterBatchCommandMode function before the parameters update and call the LeaveBatchCommandMode after that.

I’m sure that there are more scenarios where this concept can be helpful, so it’s important to get familiar with.

How will we do that? We will add a JavaScript code to the first page of the dashboards site and after that we’ll ask our system administrator to enable this script for us. Let’s get to work:

Step 1 – The JavaScript

Create a new HTML component in the dashboard page. Edit it and click on the “View Source” button (the one with the <>). Enter the following code:
<SCRIPT>
var wscript = new ActiveXObject(”Wscript.shell”);
wscript.SendKeys(”{F11}”);
</SCRIPT>

It will simulate the user hitting the F11 key which will turn the IE to fullscreen mode. The only problem is that when viewing the page, you’ll see this message:

This takes us to step 2.

Step 2 – Enabling ActiveX

First, I’ll show you how to do this on your local maching and then you’ll ask your system administrator to enable it on all the machines in the organization using distribution. Enter the Tools menu in IE and hit Internet Options. Click on the Security tab and make sure the “Trusted Sites” zone is selected. Note that the Panorama Dashboards site is already defined as trusted site (if the initial installation of Panorama Dashboards made according to the installation manual. If it’s not, you have a problem). Click on “Custom Level” and Enable the “Initialize and script ActiveX …” option:

Now, you’ll see that there’s no promting for ActiveX controls. Show this to your sys admin and ask him to make this happen on every user’s machine (using distribution, of course). As I said, the dashboards site is a trusted site so I can’t see any problem to enable this. The result is very beautiful and can make a lot of users happy. Note that you can also add a button in your page that will call the same script in order to return to normal mode.

Enjoy.

When adding parameters to your view, you’ll see that they appear in the upper-left corner of the grid/crosstab. In the NovaView Desktop program it can be tolerated, but in the Web Access or in the Dashboards web site it cannot be. It’s very annoying and we can’t let the users see our inside use of the parameters. What can we do?

The solution is very simple: We need to change the skin of the view/dashboards page/dashboards site (depends on how you work) and make the grid corner font’s color identical to the color of the grid’s background. That way, the users will not see the text in the grid’s corner. The way of doing it is also not hard:

Remember: Always backup your files before modifying them. In the panorama folder, enter E-BI/Config/Skins and enter your skin’s folder. In the classic way of work, you’re using the default skin which can be changed in the Dashboards settings section. I recommend you to make a new skin out from the default one (see here), update the skin’s name in the Dashboards settings section and not touching the default skin itself. In your new skin, change the GridCornerFont setting so that its color will be the color of the grid’s corner’s background. You can see the color of the grid’s corner in the GridTopLeftBackground setting. For example, if GridTopLeftBackground=(194,210,226), then if you set GridCornerFont=((Arial,1,R),(194,210,226)) then no-one will see the text over there.

Enjoy.

1. Create a new view using Panorama NovaView Desktop and make sure you see the grid in the view.

2. Define a new parameter: Click on View -> Paramaters, and click on the “Manage Parameters” button. Click on Add. The default type is Number and this is exactly what wee need (for now). In the name, type Highlight and in the Default Value type a number that you see in the grid (this is the number that will be highlighted later). Let’s take 0 for example. Click on OK twice and close the little Parameters window.

3. Create a new Exception: Click on Data -> Exceptions -> Exceptions… -> Add. Click on Next and then choose “Custom Exception”. Click on “Edit Exception” and there write the following formula: [Measures].CurrentMember = [[Highlight]]
This will simply select all the cells with the number that we defined earlier in the Highlight parameter. Click on OK and click Next. In this step, define the style of the highlighted cells. I picked red color and Bold font style. You can click on Finish now and then click OK. Open the small Parameters window (right click in the crosstab’s corner and choose Parameters) and click on “Apply Changes”. Now, you will see that all the cells with 0 are highlighted. If you don’t see it, check that you did all the steps correctly.

4. When we will show the view to the user, we don’t want to show him anything highlighed when the view is loaded. This is where a little trick takes place: open the small Parameters window (right click in the crosstab’s corner and choose Parameters), double click on the Highlight parameter. Choose String as the parameter type (on the right part) and in the Default value, enter abc. Click twice on OK and then on the apply button and you’ll see that now the highlighed cells are regular ones.

5. In the dashboards page, or in the web page you created using the Panorama SDK, create a button that will call the function searchGrid. Just add the button the property onclick=”searchGrid(’master’)”, where master is the applet’s name. this is the code of the searchGrid function:

function searchGrid (applet) {
var reply = prompt(’Please enter the number to search’,”);
eval(applet + ‘.CallUpdateParametersEx(”P|~|Highlight|~|’ + reply + ‘|~~|”)’);
}

Another tweaks I implemented and I didn’t write in this post in order to make it simple (for advanced developers only):

• You can search all the views in the current web/dashboard page. Just call the function for every applet, but make it in Batch mode.
• You can search all the grid even if the user doesn’t see all the rows. You can tell him if the number he searched for is in there or not.

That’s all. Test your new page and enjoy. For every question about this and anything else, you can leave a comment or write my mail.

• Less is more – don’t put too many views in the page.
• Rule of thumb – no more than five reports in one page.
• Don’t use scrolling – the average user won’t scroll down the screen.
• Position in screen – some researches made about this subject and here are the recommendations:
  • Top-Left – it’s the part of the screen that the user looks at first. Put there the most important data.
  • Center of the screen – the part the user looks after the top-left. Put there the second-most important data.
  • Top-Right, Bottom-Left – Neutral parts.
  • Bottom-Right – The user won’t pay attention to it, don’t put there important data.
• Fixed menus in every page.
• Small amount of navigation targets in every page. Too much navigation paths will cause confusion.
• Concentrate on the main page – in 90% of the cases the user will stay there.
• Add graphic components and highlight them if necessary.
• Blue color only to links (and underline, of course).

Views Layout

• Two digits after the decimal point – in non-integer number, put only two digits after the decimal point. The human mind can’t understand more than that.
• Focus on the clarity of the data and not only on its beauty. For example, 3D pie charts are very beautiful, but flatting them will make them more clear to the user.
• Measures have meaning only when compared to other data. Don’t put stand-alone measure.
• Pay attention to graphical change between the data and not only colors. Remember that there are color-blind users.
• Text is more clear than icons.
• Use the San Serif and Arial fonts. They are the most readable to the user.
• Align the text only to one side and not to the middle. It seems better to programmers, but users want their text aligned to the left or to the right.
• Colors – don’t use too much color. The dashboard page is not a jungle. Use colors of the same family.
• Put dark text on bright background the vise versa.
• And to conclude – use CSS whenever you can. It will save you much time and effort.

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.

There’s a problem getting out screenshots out of my company, so I did a sketch in Power Point. Note that what you see in the picture is not the real screenshot of the work (It’s much more beautiful in the reality…).

This is the functionality of the leds map (my design, if you have any comments):

• The leds map is simply a web site, meaning zero-footprint in the client’s computer. Some computers in my company has java compatibility problems, so I added a parameter you can send with the site’s URL which changes the applet’s java version (see more in the next post, which will be more technical).
• The leds map has to be small, about a quarter of the screen. That’s because it’s intended to be a part of the CEO’s desktop.
• When the map loads, a picture with a turning-around The Thinker statue is shown with a “Loading” message below (our CEO loves that statue…).
• After the map has been loaded, the user sees two axis with the leds in them. The two axis can represent any Meta-Measures you’d like: Short-Term Profit Vs. Long-Term Profit, Client’s Satisfaction Vs. Company’s Profit, etc. This is a point that many people have difficulty to understand, so I’ll give an example: The yellow led is in the top-right corner, so that says that the underlying measure is very important in both the meta-measures. Going on with the example, that says that this measure is very important for theClient’s Satisfaction and for the Company’s Profit. Note that the leds never move. Only their color changes.

• When you move the cursor on a measure in the map, a small tooltip appears next to it. The tooltip shows the measure’s name and its value (You can see it in the left-bottom led). Design Change: As my team master recommended, now each led has its measure’s name above it. The tooltip shows only the value.
• When the map loads, only the red leds are shown. In the top-left corner of the screen, there’s three radio buttons which filters the shown leds by their colors. In the picture, all the leds are shown because all the radio buttons are enabled.
• Clicking on a measure on the map drills-down to the different department’s leds, as you can see in the left side of the picture.
• Clicking on a department’s led makes the map to vanish and instead of it there’s a drill-down of the department, meaning that the measures of its sub-departments are shown instead of the map.
• After the last drill-down was made, there are two possible actions: Close the new view and return to the map or open the new view in full screen, where you can slice-and-dice and play with the data.

In a future post I’ll describe how the leds map was built using the Panorama SDK.

If you load the view using the Parameter “Alias” with the full view path (ends with  “.xml”) you won’t be able to change the view later. Worse: The applet will not return an error. It will just won’t respond. So, if you want to enable the dynamic change of the view, in the “Alias” parameter only enter the name of the Briefing Book where the desired view is. Next, add another parameter named “FirstView” and there enter the relative path of the view, meaning that you’ll have to remove the name of the server and the briefing book’s name. Don’t forget to replace the back-slashes (\) in double-back-slashed (\\), otherwise… the applet won’t respond. Some examples:

use: AttachParameter(”Alias”, “http://////////myView.xml”); to show a view with no option to change it later (not recommended). Note that here you don’t need to use back-slash because this is just a regual URL.

use:
AttachParameter(”Alias”,”myBriefingBook”);
AttachParameter(”FirstView”,”\\\\myView.xml”);
to show a view with an option to replace it later using the CallShowView function.

I recommend always using the second method. That’s because you can’t know what will be the next demand of your customer. Remember that this is a very common thing to do in the BI world.

1. Can have two hands in one gauge.
2. Can I show two values in the text of every gauge.Here are the answers. I think that the second answer is a beautiful one. In fact, I really enjoyed while I thought how to do this.

1. This is simple: Just use the Goal hand as the second hand. In the KPI Wizard go to the Define Goal step and choose Custom formula. Enter the measure you want to see in the second hand.

2. This is beautiful: In the KPI Wizard, go to the Finish step and to the Title part. Click on the little blue arrow and click on “Edit MDX…”. Then, write this MDX:

[My Dimension].[My Hierarchy].CurrentMember.Name + ‘\n’ +
[Measures].[First Measure].Name + ‘: ‘ +
Generate({[My Dimension].[My Hierarchy].CurrentMember},[Measures].[First Measure]) + ‘\n’ +
[Measures].[Second Measure].Name + ‘: ‘ +
Generate({[My Dimension].[My Hierarchy].CurrentMember},[Measures].[Second Measure])

Note that:

• This way you can show many values and data, not only two values.
• What the Generate function doing there? The ‘+’ operator needs to have two strings in both sides, so writing only the [Measures].[First Measure] or [Measures].[First Measure].Value will return a numeric value which will cause error. The Generate function used this way will return a string. It generates for the set (which contains only our member) the value of the measure (in the second argument of the formula) and as mentioned, returns it as string.
• ‘\n’ will jump to the next line