Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

BusinessObjects Enterprise XI is a server-based, middleware product that allows you to distribute your Crystal and BusinessObjects reports throughout your organization. In addition to reports, you can also register compiled EXEs that can run customized business logic. You can upload static documents—Excel, Acrobat, Word, and text files, and so on—so as to publish them to the enterprise. BO XI is a scalable tool that can be deployed across multiple servers so as to handle high-volume report access. With its FTP functionality, you can even use BO XI as a conduit to other computer systems. It offers scheduling, report history, notifications, events, a security model, server management, and much more. Most of the features offered by BusinessObjects XI are exposed through APIs contained in a set of SDKs. Regardless of how you use BO XI, you’ll likely take advantage of this object model to develop some kind of a customized front end. These object models and how to develop enterprise solutions with them is the subject of this book.

BusinessObjects XI is a multitier, server-based product that comprises a number of logical servers. These servers run as Windows services, and they can all be installed on one machine or distributed across multiple machines, each running multiple processors as your needs demand. In this chapter, we’ll examine how to manage those servers, command them programmatically, and extract information about them. We’ll look at programming examples of how to work with servers and server groups. If you are unfamiliar with the basics of programming with the SDK, see Chapter 5 for an introduction.

BusinessObjects XI offers a set of administration tools that allow you to manage your deployment. These tools offer a visual interface to your reports, report instances, schedules, and servers. Some of these tools, such as the Central Management Console and InfoView, are front ends to the InfoStore and FileStore, and their functionality can largely be replicated by using the SDK. Other tools such as the Import Wizard are utilities designed for a very narrow purpose (such as the BusinessObjects XI migration example listed later in this chapter), and their functionality is not intended to be replicated programmatically. In this chapter, we’ll examine these tools and utilities, and you’ll learn how you can leverage them in your daily administrative responsibilities.

As a system administrator, the first place you’ll head to do anything with BusinessObjects XI is the Central Management Console (formerly the Crystal Management Console), commonly known as the CMC. It is here that you’ll manage such things as folders, reports, servers, schedules, and users. Use of the tool is rather intuitive and highly navigable through the use of breadcrumbs , which are a series of hyperlinks that allow you to navigate back to any point you came from. This chapter will discuss how it is used to administer your BO XI installation. The tasks that you’ll learn how to perform here will be shown programmatically in the Chapters 5, 6, and 9.

The BusinessObjects XI object model is your gateway to accessing the full functionality of the product itself. Like the Microsoft Office Suite, almost anything that you can do interactively through the Central Management Console you can accomplish programmatically via the SDK. Most of the code discussed is backwardly compatible with versions 9 and 10 of Crystal Enterprise. Those features that are not are indicated as such.

In the previous chapter, we examined the fundamentals of the BusinessObjects XI object model and how the query language works. The examples showed how to extract information from the InfoStore and how to programmatically manipulate Folder and Report objects. In this chapter, we’ll build on that knowledge and look at some more advanced topics such as scheduling, notifications, export formats, destinations, printing, calendars, events, data access techniques, and the BO XI web server controls.

While this book is aimed at BusinessObjects XI development and not Crystal Reports, there is still a bit of overlap between the two products. This chapter will focus mostly on integrating your desktop-based applications with BusinessObjects XI and running reports locally without using the server tool. We’ll discuss the Crystal Reports viewer control, accessing reports from BusinessObjects XI, embedded reports, accessing disk-based reports, the CrystalDecisions. CrystalReports. Engine object model, and how to integrate with Crystal Reports web services.

The Report Application Server (RAS) is both a server that manages the delivery of reports (and as such handles its own page caching) and an SDK that allows you to create and modify reports at runtime. There are two types of RAS SDK models available. One ships with the Crystal Reports Advanced Edition and is known as the unmanaged RAS , and the other ships with BusinessObjects XI and is called the managed RAS . Unmanaged refers to the direct access the programming language provides to Crystal report files on disk. Managed refers to reports that are managed within the InfoStore. The unmanaged RAS is covered in Chapter 7.

If you already have experience programming the BusinessObjects XI SDK, this may well be the chapter you turn to first. Here we’ll build on what was discussed in the previous chapters to create real-world solutions using the BO XI object model. The material covered in this chapter is adapted from real-world solutions running in production environments. Much of what is described here should be provided by Business Objects as part of an out-of-the-box solution but, unfortunately, is not.

BusinessObjects XI offers a built-in security model to enable you to control access to its features and individual objects. You can use the security classes to Create users. Assign access privileges to those users. Assign users to groups. Create subgroups within groups. Determine what users and groups can access individual objects. Determine how many instances or for how long a given report history will be maintained.