Business Objects

Architecture and Components

Presented By:
NEHA BHATIA
Emp# 96133
CMED
Author: NEHA BHATIA
Date(MM/DD/YY): 07/09/09
Declaration
I hereby declare that this document is based on my personal experiences and experiences of my project
members. To the best of my knowledge, this document does not contain any material that infringes the
copyrights of any other individual or organization including the customers of Infosys.
Neha Bhatia
Project Details
 Projects involved – ATTAVAYA
 H/W Platform: - Windows
 S/W Environment: - Unix
 Project Type : - Maintenance

Target readers
All Infoscions
Keywords
Business Objects, Designer, BO Reporter, BCA
Purpose of the document
This document provides an overview of Business Objects architecture, explaining its various
components. It also gives a demo on how to develop and schedule reports using BO.
References
Business Objects: The Complete Reference

Declaration
Need for Business Objects
BO Architecture
Components of BO
Demo

Contents
In today’s world, data is everything. But making
sense of this data and displaying it in a manner which
enables one to view trends in it and make strategic
decisions is the real task at hand.
Business Objects has provided business users with a
powerful and relatively simple querying tool which
enables them to make quick and accurate decisions.

Need For Business Objects

Offers End-to-End Business Intelligence products
for:
◦ Data Integration
◦ Query, Reporting and Analysis
◦ Analytics
Help organizations improve decision-making

Business Objects
The basic components of the Business Objects are
Supervisor – set/grant user privileges to the reports.
Designer – building universes
BO Report designer or BO Reporter – creating
reports

Other Components
Broadcast Agent and Scheduler (BCA)
Web Intelligence / InfoView (Thin/web client)

Business Objects-Components
BO Architecture
The repository is a database that holds the Business
Objects related documents.
A Business Objects repository is a set of data
structures stored in RDBMS
The tables for this database can be created in the
same database where the data for the report lies or on
some other database. For most practical purposes it is
better to store repository in a separate database.

Repository
 To ensure security and manage user resources, a
repository comprises three types of domains:
◦ a security domain, which is unique to a repository & which
contains the definition of the other domains as well as the definition of
users
◦ universe domains, which are meta-models of related databases,
containing a description of the data to be accessed. They hold the list of
Universes that BO accesses.
◦ document domains, which contain the structures for storing shared
documents and for executing tasks according to a time stamped
definition. They hold BO reports and related files

Repository Domains
Supervisor
BO Component
It Sets up and maintains a secure environment for
Business Objects products
The Supervisor module helps in building groups and
users with different access rights and privileges.
It helps define the actions that a business user can
perform on the reports like refresh, save, publish etc
The user & role information are stored in the security
domain of the repository

Supervisor’s Tasks
SUPERVISOR offers several standard profiles for the
various types of users of Business Objects products.
 General Supervisor - senior system administrator
 Supervisor - user administration
 Designer - responsible for Creating and Maintaining Universe
 Supervisor-Designer - create user profiles, user groups, and universes
 User - query, report, and analyze data
 Versatile - customized user

User Profiles
User Hierarchy and Resource Access
Designer
BO Component
 Universe is a semantic layer between database and BO reports, built
with the Business Objects Designer tool.
A Universe is a business-oriented mapping of the data structure
found in databases: tables, columns, joins, etc. With Supervisor,
one can authorize users and user groups to access one or more
universes.
 The mapping can be either one to one or derived
 One to one
[EMPLOYEE NAME] = [TBL_EMP_DATA].[EMP_NM]
 Derived
[EMPLOYEE ANNUAL SALARY] =
[TBL_EMP_DATA].[EMP_SAL_PM] * 12

Universe
Tables
Classes
Objects
Joins
Contexts

Components of Universe
A logical way of grouping objects.

Can be compared with a table but not always.

Should make business sense.

Appears with a folder icon

Classes
An object
is the most refined component in a universe.
maps to data or a derivation of data in the database.
represents a column or function in a database.

Objects are the data elements which perform the query

on the Warehouse, and are returned with
corresponding values.

Object
 For the purposes of analysis, objects are qualified as
Dimension Object
Measure Object
Detail Object

Types of Objects
The various parameters for an analysis are depicted
by Dimension objects. They relate to a hierarchy, for
example: geography, product, or time.
In a report, the data that provides the basis for
analysis is retrieved from the Dimension Objects
only.
A dimension basically maps to one or more database
columns or functions
◦ Dimension Object : represented by blue cube

Dimension objects
Detail objects provide a description of a dimension
but are not the focus of the analysis.
Detail Objects are used to give more information on
an entity.
A detail is always attached to a dimension but can
map to one or more columns or functions in the
database that provide detailed information related to
a dimension.
◦ Detail Objects : represented by green pyramid.
For example: Phone Number in the Student Universe.

Detail objects
Measure objects retrieve numeric data, or data that is
the result of calculations on data in the database.
◦ Measure Objects : represented by pink sphere.
For example: No. of students in the Students
Universe.

Measure objects
Report Designer
BO Component
Data provider is the way by which Business Objects
Reports access data from the data sources. Data can be
accessed from different data sources like Relational
Database, OLAP databases, Text files and spreadsheets,
and VBA macros
The types of data provider that Business Objects supports
are
Queries on Universe
Stored Procedure
Free Hand SQL
Personal data file
VBA Procedures

Data Providers
Queries enable you to retrieve data from a database,
via a universe. You build a query to bring data to a
report, either when you create the report or when you
want to view new data.
When you build a query, you select objects from a
universe, and then run the query.
BUSINESSOBJECTS connects to the database, and
retrieves the data mapped by the objects you
selected.

Queries on Universe
Free-hand SQL is a type of data provider that enables
you to work with SQL scripts in
BUSINESSOBJECTS. You can open and run
existing SQL scripts; users who know SQL can write
their own scripts. You can also use free-hand SQL to
make changes to the database, if the
BUSINESSOBJECTS supervisor has granted you the
right to do so.

Free Hand SQL

 The WEBINTELLIGENCE system is a thin client, used for
interactive reporting and analysis.
 BO distributed solution relies on such an infrastructure as
WEBI, so that the information can be accessed, analyzed, and
shared among business users.
 The data in the corporate databases or data warehouses can be
accessed using WEBI, from within office (intranet), home, or
around the world (using extranet or Internet)
 WEBI runs in Internet Browser.

Three modules in WEBI are as follows

 Web intelligence InfoView
 Web intelligence Reporter
 Web intelligence Explorer

WEBI
Infoview is an e-Business Intelligence portal, used
mainly to view the documents generated with BO.
With Infoview, users get a single entry point to all
the documents they need.

The documents that can be viewed in Infoview are

categorized as:
Corporate Documents
Personal Documents
Inbox Documents
Scheduled Documents

InfoView
A document scheduler that allows the user to schedule
and publish reports in a number of ways.
BCA is a scheduler used for performing activities like
time based report refresh, publish, e-mail, file save etc
BCA has to be installed in a separate server
(single/clustered).
The documents that users send to Broadcast Agent are
stored in the repository’s document domain. The
Scheduler periodically scans the domain and extracts
documents that are due for processing.

BCA
Creating Universe
Demo
 Developing &
Scheduling Reports
Demo
THANK YOU