Designer is the Business Objects tool for universe development and management and as we all know Universe if the core of reporting
in Business Objects. UMT is a productivity tool which compliments and adds to what Designer provides and takes your business
objects deployment to the next level.
The below section explains the features in detail:
Compare and Merge Universes
One of those is the ability to compare two or three different universes and move a slice or a subset of the universe from one
universe to a different universe. This includes comparison of classes, objects, conditions, hierarchies, contexts, joins,
tables, derived tables, parameters and selectively moving the same between universes.
As part of this feature, users of the tool can also generate audit trails for differences between universes and also the
actual moves at the object and condition level.
Report Impact Analysis (RIA)
Universes are modified for multiple reasons, a change in the application data model or a change to an existing object or
a condition. Today there is no easy way to identify the extent of this impact of this change on the reports in the repository
and also the reports that analysts have created for their own purpose. The only option user has is to pick one report at a
time and check to see if this object is used.
Using RIA, users will be able to identify the reports that are getting impacted on account of a change right from the
compare universes screen and independently depending on a specific change to the database column or an object or a
condition in the universe.
Once the reports as shown in the below figure are identified and listed, the result can be downloaded into an excel file for
future reference. This will reduce the amount of time the IT department needs to spend on doing regression testing by identifying
only those reports that are being impacted.
DB Changes Update
One of the main things that are part of the universe is the logical data model that is built which is used as a basis for
creation of the user model (classes, objects, conditions etc). Once the first version of the universe is put into production,
over a period of time, there are changes that are happening at the physical level in the database. Today with the designer,
there is no easy way to automatically update the universe with the delta changes. The DB Changes update feature allows the
user to select a table or a set of tables and automatically update the universe by creating a hidden, time stamped class
with the newly added and modified columns in the database. The user after this point is free to go and add these objects
into the right classes.
Universe Version Control
One of the major risk areas when a universe is being published to the repository is the new changes overriding the existing
universe. Designer does not provide a way to save a version of the existing universe as a backup in case the user wants to
revert the changes. Version control feature of the UMT tool allows user to go back to a previous version from the interface.
This feature will work only when the universes are published using UMT tool.
The user can restore a previous version of the universe or do a comparison of the current version with the historical version
right from this screen.
Document Universe and Bulk Update properties
These two features together allow the use document a universe into an excel sheet which is a much more manageable format
then the PDF document that can be generated from the Designer. This will allow better management of universe Meta data
and also sharing of information.
The bulk update feature allows the users of the tool to modify all the descriptions for objects, conditions, classes
etc and upload/save the same in one shot into the universe. This improves the productivity of the tool multifold.
Switch Universe for Reports
This is a feature using which the user of the UMT tool will be able to switch the universe of one of more reports in one
shot using a simple drag and drop operation from a windows based front end.
Report Documentation
This feature allows the business objects developers and administrators document a report into an excel sheet, it gives
out complete details on the report including the objects from the universe that are used, the variables that are declared
on the report along with the formulae used. It also documents the formatting components that are available on the report
like tables, their dimensions etc. Below given is a screen shot of the same:
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