Public and protected data in sums

[Rosta]

Hello all,
I would appreciate an advice concerning following problem.
We are collecting economical data from hospitals and other institutions from the health area. Some of these institutions agree with publishing their data, some don't - their data are protected. Public data can be displayed in reports, protected data must not. Protection status of summary data depends on the character of individual data. Sum of public data is public; status of the sum of all protected or mixture of protected and public data depends on the number of items - sum of 3 or more items is public, but sum of 2 or less items is protected. Have you any ideas how to solve it using BusinessObjects? Our current version of BO is 6.1. Now, the data is processed using special FoxPro programs. Some time ago, I tried to solve it using BO object model, but it seemed so complicated for me, that I gave up.
Thank you in advance for any ideas.

 

[blom0344]

If I understand correctly then the verdict of public/protected depends upon the outcome of queries.
You cannot work this into the model, since this is entirely dynamic. From a report standpoint you could use count-objects that indicate the #no of rows involved in an aggregation. That would give you a handle to suppress certain combinations.

The only other way I can think of is to build pre-aggregates (perhaps views) and make sure that you mask combinations not suited for the public eye..

Ties Blom

 

[skrandel]

There is no way you can get your query tool to do this.

Ask yourself this: How would I do this with SQL. BO is simply generating SQL.

You will need to solve this at the back end. As blom notes, Security (Public, Private) is only dealt with during the execution of a query. It does not exist on the report.

I think you're going to need a very complex stored procedure to deal with this. It will likely have to create a table in the database that aggregates the data they way you want.

Bottom line: You need to solve this BEFORE running the query.

Steve Krandel
Intuit

 

[Rosta]

Thank you for your comments.
I think that I'll try again to solve the problem using BO object model. I'll try to create a primary BO report (including public/protected status and counts of protected items in sums). This report will show all the data regardless of its public/protected status. Then I'll transform all formulas in the report to conditional ones using Visual FoxPro program (and BO object model). The result of such transformation would be a secondary report taking into account public/protected issues.

 

[blom0344]

You're a brave man!!

Ties Blom