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I'm looking for books with regards to SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI Infoview reports application, can you advise me of the best books for beginners/intermediate users? I have located a few but I am not sure if they are the right ones for me. I have been using the application for 2 years as a front end users but need to develop my skills so that I can create reports and have a thorough understanding of the application.
There's all sorts of documentation available which may get you up and running. I'll include a non-limiting list below.
One important thing to know upfront is the version of BusinessObjects you're working with. Most documentation you'll find will pertain to the most recent version: SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1. If you're working with a previous version (e.g. XIr2 or XI 3.1), you may find that there are quite substantial differences, depending on what you part of the platform you're using.
Another remark: InfoView is a portal, it's not a type of report. This is a common mistake that's made, where users don't learn the proper nomenclature. Types of reports that are available within the BusinessObjects platform are:
Desktop Intelligence (no longer available as of BI4)
Web Intelligence
Crystal Reports
There are other document types as well (e.g. Dashboards and Analysis for Office), but these are not typical "reports".
Online documentation:
SAP Help Portal
Official Product Tutorials
Books:
SAP Press's selection of books on BusinessObjects
I'll assume you're referring to Web Intelligence reports. In that case, SAP has created a new Getting Started guide released with recent versions of BI4 (available here). I would also recommend having a look at the Official Product Tutorials related to Web Intelligence. As they are interactive, visual and split into small, specific tasks, they can help you get a basic understanding relatively fast.
If you prefer a book, then I'm sure this book by SAP Press will contain all the information you need.
Good luck!
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I am searching for an affordable alternative to RedGate's ReadyRoll for continuous deployment for SQL.
All of my searches are returning open source projects from nearly a decade ago.
Does anyone have a decent alternative???
Which edition of Visual Studio do you use? If you are fortunate enough to own Visual Studio Enterprise Edition, Redgate (who I work for) has an arrangement with Microsoft to supply ReadyRoll Core Edition at part of your entitlement.
If you're using VS Pro or Community then you'll either have to purchase ReadyRoll Pro or you can try one of the open source projects out there. As you point out there are a bunch of OSS projects that are no longer kept up to date, but Flyway is the exception and actively maintained. Mind you, unlike ReadyRoll Flyway doesn't generate the migration scripts for you. It simply provides a framework to manage and run unrun migrations scripts that you have authored yourself against your chosen target database.
Note: ReadyRoll Core has been removed from VS 2019
We've been happy just using SQL Server Database projects within Visual Studio, deploying to our databases as needed. It helps that we're using domain driven design so almost all the tables are built by the C# devs.
Check out AzureDbUp.
It's DbUp wrapped into a console application for use in your devops pipelines.
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I am brand new to Pentaho and have the task of trying to integrate it into some Java applications I have been working on. So far my experience with Pentaho includes downloading the community BI-Server and setting up a couple of things in the admin console (new users/datasources). I was able to get access to the datasource in my PUC as well for reports and analysis.
Now I am trying to do practically the same thing in Java (Add a new datasource and configure it). I have been looking for different Java APIs and I must admit it is quite overwhelming with all the different APIs that are available (BI Platform, Kettle, Mondrian, Weka, Reporting). I decided to go with the BI Platform as this is the one that seems like it will fit this need. However the javadocs that are provided here seem to be out of date. I have imported the 4.8.0 dependency into my Java project via Maven and it seems I do not have some of the classes that are specified in the javadocs. Pentaho's APIs will probably begin to make more sense the more I dig into them, but as an overwhelmed n00b I need help in the following three ways.
1) Is pentaho-bi-platform-api the correct API to connect to and administer datasources?
2) Are there any useful java examples of the API that I could look at? (havent been able to find much on Google)
3) Does anyone know if these javadocs are out of date and if so are there any more recent versions?
Thanks a bunch
Many of the Pentaho projects have been moved to GitHub:
https://github.com/pentaho
This includes the data-access plugin, which handles the creation and configuration of datasources. The 4.8 branch is here:
https://github.com/pentaho/data-access/tree/4.8
And the latest 4.8 release tag (4.8.1-GA) is here:
https://github.com/pentaho/data-access/tree/4.8.1-GA
So I found out a good place to get examples. If you go to http://community.pentaho.com/getthecode/ you can find all the SVN repositories for the projects. After pulling in the projects from SVN do an ANT build on the build.xml using the resolve function. After that I was able to look at all the Unit tests that are included in the project and figure out how everything works.
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Can anyone give advice, or point to any guides, on how to manage a community of open source software developers in writing api documentation?
A typical, unmanaged, starting point for most projects is to have a project wiki where anyone can freely create pages, add content to existing pages, edit existing content etc. The problem is that, despite people's best intentions, the wiki can easily end up being a disorganised, poorly written, incomplete, written in disparate voices etc etc.
So, what to do to improve the quality of the documentation?
I suspect a key ingredient is clear editorial/style guidelines, something similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Encyclopedic_style#Information_style_and_tone. Can anyone point to an example of such a guide tailored specifically to software apis?
Are there any other practices that people have found useful? E.g. form a core team of editors and accept that most documentation that gets added by the community will most likely need to be 'strongly edited'?
The short answer, that the solution is social/human and not technical. The way to get good documentation for any project is to have someone with time, in charge of doing high level organization for the documentation, and then being involved in the development and user communities to ensure that the documentation remains up to date and continues to address the problems and confusions that users typically have.
Community projects have accepted that you need point people (i.e. "managers," for aspects of the project like "translation," and "release," and for various components. The same thing needs to happen for documentation.
As for tools, Sphinx is really great though it's not "wiki like," exactly you can use whatever version control system your project is comfortable with to store documentation and configure your web server to rebuild the documentation following commits/updates/pushes. Which has always worked just fine for any project I've worked on/with.
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I work for a insurance company. We have our own development department made-up of almost 150 people plus some providers (outsourcing and custom made apps pretty much). In our company my team have made what we call non-functional logic libraries. That is, software libraries to handle things that are horizontal to all the development teams in our department, e.g. Security, Webservices, Logging, Messaging and so on. Most or these tools are either made from scratch or adaptation of a de-facto standard. For example our logger is an appender based on Log4J that also saves the logging messages into a DB. We also define what libraries to use in the application, for example which framework for webservices to use. We use pretty much JavaEE and Oracle AS in all our organization (with some Websphere Application servers).
Much of these projects have their architecture documented (use cases, UML diagrams, etc) and generally the generated documentation are available.
Now what we have seen is that for users sometimes is difficult to use the the libraries we provide and the are constantly asking question or they simply don't use them.
So we are planning to generate a more friendly documentation for them, so my question is:
What are the best practices or the checklist that software documentation should have?
Something comes to my mind:
API Reference guide
Quick start Tutorial
API Generated Documentation.
Must be searchable
Web Access
What else should it have? Also, based in your experience what is the best way to maintain (keep it up-to-date) and publish this type of documentation?
Keep your documentation in version control too.
Make sure on every page it has a version number so you know where your user has been reading from.
Get a CI server going and push documentation to a LIVE documentation site upon updates.
Do documentation reviews like you would code reviews.
Dog-food it :)
Kindness,
Dan
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This weekend I installed Windows 7 (brilliant!) and there I found this genious tool called Problem Steps Recorder. Apparently a tool that came with the beta bug reporting tool thingy.
I am currently trying to document some application usages for other developers. (In this exact case, how to get Showplan XML Statistics in SQL Profiler and some basic usage of Database Engine Tuning Advisor). And I was thinking that a tool like that Problem Steps Recorder with be perfect for this! Only problem is that it is only in windows 7 (?) and the output is an mht file which also contains some general bug issue text etc...
Anyways, does anyone know if this tool is available in a more general version? Or if there are some free and smooth alternatives which does kind of the same thing for Vista (and other windows versions if possible)?
Maybe Wink is your answer.
I'm looking for a better capture tool for both user documentation and reporting bugs. The best "steps recorder" that I've seen is bundled with Testuff. Their Test Runner app lets you select a region to record (video). It captures every mouse click and logs every key press along side the video playback. Of course, it's designed only for reporting bugs to a development team.
I'm still using SnagIt (cheap, not free) for capturing screens and adding annotations. I also have Camtasia, but that's definitely not "free" as you requested :)
I just stumbled upon 'Imago recorder', available via various software / download sites. It's not pretty but it does the trick and it's free.
It's currentyl available here
Additional option you should definitely pay attention to is StepsToReproduce. There are several options for recording (screen/window/region) and nice powerful annotation tools. And it's also free!