Web Intelligence Related Questions

1) How does Web Intelligence work?
Web Intelligence provides business users an easy to use interactive and flexible user interface for building and analyzing reports on corporate data over the web, on secured intranets and extranets. The Web Intelligence software is installed by your administrator on a web server on your corporate network. To use Web Intelligence from you local computer, you log into the business intelligence portal InfoView via your Internet browser. Then, depending on your security profile, you can interact with the reports in corporate documents or edit or build your own documents using a Web Intelligence report panel or query panel.

2) What are different tools used to create or edit Web Intelligence reports?
You can create or edit Web Intelligence documents using one of several tools:
• Java Report Panel
• Query – HTML
• HTML Report Panel

3) How is Web Intelligence Java Report Panel designed?
The Java Report Panel is designed for users who need more flexibility with designing report layout and defining formulas and variables. A graphical Formula Editor enables you to build formulas rapidly using drag-and-drop.

Note: The Web Intelligence Java Report Panel is available if your administrator has deployed Web Intelligence in ASP mode and if your administrator has deployed Web Intelligence in JSP mode.

4) How is Web Intelligence Query- HTML designed?
Designed for users requiring a pure HTML environment to build data providers, Web Intelligence Query – HTML offers the ability to define the data content of documents on multiple data sources. You can use Query – HTML to create new documents from scratch or edit the data providers in documents created using any of the other Web Intelligence tools.

Used together with On-Report Analysis, Query – HTML provides a complete solution for building data providers and designing powerful reports in a pure HTML environment. Once you have run the data providers to generate a standard report, you can leverage Web Intelligence On-Report Analysis features to format multiple reports, add formulas, and create variables.
Note: Web Intelligence Query – HTML and On-Report Analysis in Interactive view format are only available, if your administrator has deployed Web Intelligence in JSP mode.

5) How is Web Intelligence HTML Report Panel?

Designed for users who need to build basic reports, the HTML Report Panel provides query and report features in a simple wizard-like interface. Each document is based on a single data source and can contain multiple reports, displaying different subsets of information. In addition, the HTML Report Panel is 508 compliant and can be customized for specialized deployments.

Note: The Web Intelligence HTML Report Panel is only available, if your administrator has deployed Web Intelligence in JSP mode.

6) What information do you need before logging into Infoview?
Before you can use InfoView and Web Intelligence you need the following information:
• a URL to the InfoView server
• the InfoView server name and port number
• your login and password
• your authentication, which controls the InfoView resources available to you

7) What are the two ways in which data in the Web Intelligence document is edited?
There are two ways to open a Web Intelligence document in edit mode:
• view the document first and then switch to Edit mode
• switch to edit mode directly without viewing the document contents first

8) What are data providers?
A data provider contains one or more queries that return data from a database. A query requests data from the database. If the data is available, then the requested data is returned by default in the form of a table which contains rows and columns. When you build a query, you are creating a request for information from a database. A request can be very simple, for example; give me total sales in California for the first quarter of last year, or more complicated, for example; give me an average age of customers who bought sweaters during the spring television promotion in Paris.
Queries are sent to the databases in a language called SQL (Structured Query Language). However, when you use Web Intelligence you do not have to know any SQL. The Web Intelligence report panel presents the information available in the database as objects that have names and meanings familiar to you. These objects are organized in a structure called a universe.
You build data providers by combining objects in a universe. The universe translates the objects presented in your business language to SQL, and then sends the request for information to the database. Web Intelligence can generate SQL data providers of unlimited length. When the data is returned to the Web Intelligence report panel, it is presented in a table form, with columns that have the same names as the objects that you used in the query. The data is arranged in rows.

9) What is scope of analysis?
The scope of analysis for a query is extra data that you can retrieve from the database to give more details on the data returned by each of the objects in a query. This extra data does not appear in the initial result document, but it remains available in the data cube, so you can pull this data in to the report to allow you to access more detail at any time. This process of refining the data to lower levels of detail is called drilling down on an object.
In the universe, the scope of analysis corresponds to the hierarchical levels below the object selected for a query. For example, a scope of analysis of one level down for the object Year, would include the object Quarter, which appears immediately under Year.
You can set this level when you build a query. It allows objects lower down the hierarchy to be included in the query, without them appearing in the Results Objects pane. The hierarchies in a universe allow you to choose your scope of analysis, and correspondingly the level of drill available.
You can also create a custom scope of analysis by selecting specific dimensions to the Scope of Analysis pane.
Note: You cannot define a scope of analysis when working in Query Drill mode. Query Drill defines the scope automatically in response to drill actions.

10) What is the functionality of cube?
The scope of analysis for a query is extra data that you can retrieve from the database to give more details on the data returned by each of the objects in a query. This extra data does not appear in the initial result document, but it remains available in the data cube, so you can pull this data in to the report to allow you to access more detail at any time. This process of refining the data to lower levels of detail is called drilling down on an object.
When you run the query, the dimensions included in the scope of analysis are returned to the cube for that document, but are not projected onto the reports that the document contains. They can be added to the reports at any time, without having to run the query again. Values for the dimensions in the scope of analysis can also be viewed by switching a report to Drill mode, and then drilling down to them from the values displayed on the report.

11) What is an ambiguous query?
An ambiguous query is a query that contains one or more objects that can potentially return two different types of information. In a universe, certain dimensions may have values that are used for two different purposes in the database. For example, the [Country] dimension in the query below can return two types of information:
• Customers and the country in which they spent their vacation.
• Customers and the country for which they have made their reservation.
The role that Country plays in this query is ambiguous. A country value can be either the country where a vacation was sold, or a country where a vacation is reserved. One is existing information (sales), and the other is future information (reservations). To avoid ambiguities in a query, the universe designer identifies the different ways that objects can be used in the universe, and implements restrictions on how these objects can be combined. These restrictions are called contexts.

12) What is a context?
A context is a defined group of objects that share a common business purpose. This business purpose is usually the type of information that these related objects represent. For example, a sales context is a grouping of all the objects that can be used to create sales data providers. A reservations context is a grouping of all the objects that can be used in reservation data providers. Contexts are defined in a universe by the universe designer.
You can combine any object within the same context to create a query. You can also combine objects in different contexts. If you use an object that is common to both contexts, Web Intelligence will try to determine the context that best fits the other objects in the query.

13) What are incompatible objects?
Sometimes it is not possible to use certain combinations of objects in data providers. This situation arises when objects bear no relationship to one another. These objects are called incompatible objects.
For example, the Island Resorts Marketing universe contains the [Reservation Year] and [Revenue] objects, which are incompatible. This is because there is no revenue associated with a reservation. Revenue is generated only when the customer is invoiced. The underlying database structure reflects this; you cannot build a query that aggregates revenue by reservation year because there is no such thing as revenue by reservation year. In other words, the aggregation context that you specified for the
[Revenue] object does not exist.

When you build a query, Web Intelligence generates SQL behind the scenes. This SQL is run against the database to produce a result that Web Intelligence displays in a report. For a query to be free of incompatible objects, Web Intelligence must be able to generate a single SQL query to retrieve the data. If this is not possible, the query contains incompatible objects.

14) How can queries be combined and what is the use?
You can combine queries in three relationships:
• union
• intersection
• minus
In a union combination, Web Intelligence takes the all the data from both queries, eliminates duplicate rows, and builds a combined data set.
In an intersection combination, Web Intelligence returns the data that is common to both queries.
In a minus combination, Web Intelligence returns the data in the first query that does not appear in the second.

15) What is purging?
When you purge data from a document you remove all data from the document, while leaving the document structure intact. If the document contains multiple data providers, you can purge specific data providers within the document.

16) What are the different table templates used in Web Intelligence?
The different table templates you can use to display information on Web Intelligence reports:
• Vertical tables: Vertical tables display header cells at the top of the table and the
corresponding data in columns.
• Vorizontal tables: Horizontal tables display header cells at the left of the table and the corresponding data in rows.
• Crosstabs: Crosstabs are useful for presenting results that correspond to the intersection of two or more dimensions.
• Forms: Forms are useful in your report if you want to display detailed information per customer, product, or partner. For example, a form is a useful way of
displaying individual customer records with information such as the customer account, name, address, and so on