Posts Tagged ‘SAP’

Quick Fix: DeskI Query Panel Appears Invisible / Off Screen

For the last couple of weeks I’ve had an extremely unusual problem in Business Objects Desktop Intelligence (DeskI), whenever I went to edit a Data Provider nothing would happen.  Initially it looked like DeskI had hung but hitting escape returned me back into the report, I figured that because the Query Panel is modal it must be launching but for some reason I couldn’t see it. 

After a little bit of searching I managed to find the solution on the excellent BOB Forum (original post here) and I just had to reproduce it since I found it quite tough to find but hats off to Marek Chladny who came up with the solution – if you’re ever in the UK let me know and I’ll buy you a beer! 

1. Go to Edit Data Provider. 
2. Press Alt + Space
3. Press M
4. Use the arrows to move the Query Panel back onto the screen. 

Marek mentions that this only works if the Query Panel isn’t maximised, also I assume that since this uses standard Windows keyboard shortcuts it might work for any other application where you have a similar issue.  As for how it came about, I have no idea – it may be something to do with occasionally using a single-screen PC to remote-desktop into my dual-screen desktop.

How to Kill Sessions in Business Objects XI (R2 + R3)

There are some areas of functionality that the Business Objects admin tools really lack, one is the ability to view who is currently using the system and then kill a particular session.  These tools can be useful if you’re diagnosing problems and whilst BO don’t provide them the SDK does allow for them to be created and thankfully Johnny Ye has created the Business Objects XI Session Removal Tool, it’s fairly rudimentary in design terms but it does the job perfectly and I’m sure if you know Java and HTML you could customise it easily.

Out of the box it should work with XI R3 but I’ve not tried it since I’m currently running XI R2, in order to get it running on Release 2 you’ll need to modify Johnny’s instructions as follows (instructions taken from this thread on BOB)…

1. In the new_utilities.jsp file change the
line: result += "Delta " +conn.getDelta()+"<br>";
to: result += "Delta " + "na"/*(conn.getDelta()*/+"<br>";

2. Copy the library files from:
~\Tomcat\webapps\businessobjects\enterprise115\adminlaunch\WEB-INF\lib
to:
~\Tomcat\webapps\KillSession\WEB-INF\lib

NOTE: ~ = “C:\Program Files\Business Objects”

3. Restart Apache/Tomcat (I’m using IIS so this didn’t really impact my users).