“Jim is Back”. In this post – Jim Brogden, a BI Consultant from Daugherty Business Solutions gives Step-by-Step Instructions on “How to use Xcelsius 2008 to communicate with Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports.”
Utilize the new Interportlet Communication (IPC) feature in Dashboard Builder 3.1 (and within BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1) to pass data between Xcelsius 2008, Web Intelligence documents and Crystal Reports.
Through the use of “Content Linking”, this type of communication can now take place between the products listed above – all within the same Dashboard Builder portlet. The steps below will walk you through the incredibly simple process of linking an Xcelsius model (used as the source) to two Web Intelligence documents as targets.
Not only can Xcelsius be used as the source analytic but it can be the target as well. Content Linking and IPC allow for linking to take place between two or more Xcelsius models.
Linking Xcelsius and Web Intelligence
Let’s start by creating a prompted Web Intelligence report. In this example, I will be using the Islands Resort Marketing Universe (that comes packaged with BOE XI 3.1) to create the report. The screenshot below is from a simple Web Intelligence report with a filter added for the Country field and set to Prompt for input. The name of the filter (or text of the prompt) has been changed to “COUNTRY”.