A Change in FM Package

[cognos4321]

Hi Experts,

I have a very basic question.

A a change is made to the FM package and a few reports are using that package.
Now, do we need to individually go and edit each report or it's going to be auto refreshed?
I think it will be auto refreshed(if I am correct) but:
- do we need to use some functionality to get it auto refreshed.
- Is there something which needs to taken care of as a best practice when changes in FM package are done.

Thanks in advance.

[MFGF]

Hi Experts,

I have a very basic question.

A a change is made to the FM package and a few reports are using that package.
Now, do we need to individually go and edit each report or it's going to be auto refreshed?
I think it will be auto refreshed(if I am correct) but:
- do we need to use some functionality to get it auto refreshed.
- Is there something which needs to taken care of as a best practice when changes in FM package are done.

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

What sort of change are you referring to? Is it something that will break existing reports? Something new that has been added to a package that is not currently used in any of the reports? Something else?

In Framework Manager there is an option labelled "Analyze publish impact" - this will check against the content store on the BI server and determine what will be affected if you were to publish your package at this point. You can further use an option "Find report dependencies" that will tell you exactly which reports would be affected. Thus you can determine before publishing what impact it would have if you were to go ahead and do it.

If the above two options are telling you that some reports will break if you publish, you can choose to publish using model versioning. This will leave your original package in place in the content store, and add a new version alongside. Any existing reports will continue to point to the original package version (and this will continue to work) until such time as you open them in a studio - at that point they will be re-pointed to the new package version and you can fix the issue(s) before saving. Any new reports you create will automatically point to the latest package version.

So, no - reports do not automatically auto-refresh when you change the metadata they use. You need to update them.

Cheers!

MF.

[cognos4321]

Thanks a lot MFGF for all the explanation. I was eagerly waiting for a response.

There is a ID number which has been changed (suppose from 101 to 202) and is used in almost every report in a financial institution. So now what would be the best process to fix this issue.

Please pardon my ignorance and let me know where can I find options  'Analyze publish impact' and 'Find report dependencies' in FM.

Regards.

[MFGF]

Thanks a lot MFGF for all the explanation. I was eagerly waiting for a response.

There is a ID number which has been changed (suppose from 101 to 202) and is used in almost every report in a financial institution. So now what would be the best process to fix this issue.

Please pardon my ignorance and let me know where can I find options  'Analyze publish impact' and 'Find report dependencies' in FM.

Regards.

Hi,

Sadly that wouldn't normally class as a change in the metadata - the Query Item is still called ID and it has the same data type and size. FM wouldn't recognize that anything has changed - because in terms of metadata it hasn't. What you are describing here is a change to the data, not the metadata. It won't break any reports (ie they won't start producing errors due to missing columns they require), but it could well change the rows they return, if you are filtering for that specific ID value. Normally you'd expect reports to be documented, including the values they filter on if hard-coded. You'd need to refer to these documents to see which reports are affected.

To answer your other question, to find the "Analyze publish impact" option, right-click on the appropriate package in FM and you will see the option in the right-click menu. Alternatively, click on the package and from the menubar select Actions > Package > Analyze publish impact. If this finds changes, it will display them in a dialog, and in the top right corner of this dialog is a link "Find Report Dependencies"

Cheers!

MF.

[cognos4321]

Thanks MF for such a detailed explanation for an amateur like me.

Got it for the current scenario where data is getting changed and metadata is not.

Just for the sake of my knowledge if I get across something like this again. How would you go about if the metadata was changing. We can take any example like if 'country ID' is named as 'region Id' or any metadata getting changed that you can think of, then how would I proceed to fix the current reports getting affected.

Thanks a lot for your time and patience.

[MFGF]

Thanks MF for such a detailed explanation for an amateur like me.

Got it for the current scenario where data is getting changed and metadata is not.

Just for the sake of my knowledge if I get across something like this again. How would you go about if the metadata was changing. We can take any example like if 'country ID' is named as 'region Id' or any metadata getting changed that you can think of, then how would I proceed to fix the current reports getting affected.

Thanks a lot for your time and patience.

Hi,

It's in my first post above:

In Framework Manager there is an option labelled "Analyze publish impact" - this will check against the content store on the BI server and determine what will be affected if you were to publish your package at this point. You can further use an option "Find report dependencies" that will tell you exactly which reports would be affected. Thus you can determine before publishing what impact it would have if you were to go ahead and do it.

If the above two options are telling you that some reports will break if you publish, you can choose to publish using model versioning. This will leave your original package in place in the content store, and add a new version alongside. Any existing reports will continue to point to the original package version (and this will continue to work) until such time as you open them in a studio - at that point they will be re-pointed to the new package version and you can fix the issue(s) before saving. Any new reports you create will automatically point to the latest package version.

Once you are editing a report in a studio you simply need to replace the original (broken) item with the new one from the package.

MF.

[cognos4321]

Ok Thanks MF