Before you release a new or changed universe to your production environment, you should always do an integrity check using the menu-option  Tools/Check Integrity… , in designer and resolve the problems.

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But what about the parse errors you get from the date/time-objects in the Ultimate Generic Date/Time-framework? First of all, why do you get these errors?

In fact each object you create has to be connected to a table! Otherwise you will receive a parse-error!

For example, in DB2 using  current_date – 1 day will return yesterday as date.  In BO you can create an object and use it in a query with other objects without any problem. But using it as a standalone object in your select-statement or doing a parse on the object will result in an error message.

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Parse error

Parse error

Is there a way to solve this problem?

Yes, first, create a dummy-derived-table in your universe and link the object to the dummy table.

The sql for the dummy table in DB2 is ‘Select 1 as dummyfield from sysibm.sysdummy1’

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Next link the object to the dummy table

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If you try to parse the object now, the result will be ok.

Because of the special nature of the objects, there are still two (hidden) objects in the framework where linking to a dummy-table is not suitable. And in this case the above trick will not work. And you will have to live with those two remaining parse errors.

The two objects are:

  • SuperUserdefinedDateFilterPrompt
  • GenericDateDimension

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So, problem solved. Yes and no, there is one disadvantages. Creating a query using one of the date/time objects will result in a query with a dummy table not linked to any other table in From-clause of the query. Is this a problem? Yes but only for Desktop Intelligence documents.

In this case ‘Desktop Intelligence’- documents will present a ‘cartesian product’- dialog box to confirm, after each refresh.  Indeed very annoying for the end-user, the lucky ones are the Web Intelligence users. They won’t be bothered with this dialog.

So, if you still have Deski (or a mixed environment) using a dummy table to get rid of the parse error is unfortunately no option. Yet another reason to migrate to Webi 🙂

Regards

ps: I will soon adjust and re-publish  all my frameworks with this dummy-table solution.

Semantic Layer

02/25/2013

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