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Dashboards and Delivery
By Troy D. Gottfried – MCP, BECP, CRCP
While I am a strong advocate of the “self-serve” model of Business
Intelligence, there are times when consumers do not have access to their corporate BI platform, making it impossible for
them to log in and browse for content. In these instances, and many others, delivering dashboards becomes essential.
Xcelsius offers a great solution to this problem: embedding Xcelsius
dashboards directly in a Crystal Report. By utilizing the Crystal Report Data Consumer, dashboards can be delivered in
.pdf format via email and still retain their interactivity. Each Xcelsius file can only contain a single Crystal Report
Data Consumer connection, so it forces the user into some best practices: making your dashboards more modular. The
reason this is such a good idea is reuse, reuse, reuse. That one Xcelsius file can be reused in other Crystal Reports
for different dashboards.
Using Crystal Reports as the data source for your dashboards provides
other benefits as well. Since Crystal Reports has such a robust formula language, the pre-formatting and conditioning
of the data can be done in a familiar content-type, and one that is central to the platform. Many designers use Crystal
Reports to feed the Excel documents they use to build dashboards anyway, so by using them as a delivery mechanism as
well is simply an extension of the platform.
One of the other great advantages of delivering dashboards this way is
the ability to use Publications in order to restrict the data in the dashboard at the row level. Publications are
scheduled packages of reports that can automate delivery and “bursting” of reports.
To employ this method, here are the steps involved:
- Design Flash components using Crystal Reports Data Consumer Data Connections
- Create a base Crystal Report with data to feed Xcelsius Flash files
- “Hook Up” Flash files to Crystal Report data
- Save report to Enterprise
- Create Publication for scheduling
- Consume dashboard-report from Adobe Acrobat
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