Purpose
The purchase of this article is to provide information on the steps necessary to create a web page from Content Library in BPC 7.5 for Microsoft.
Overview
This article serves as a step-by-step guide for creating a web page by using contents that are published using the BPC for Excel ‘Book Publishing’ function. It will include information on:
- What the various options are during web page design.
- How these options are associated with the contents published by the Super User when using the Book Publishing Wizard.
- How user access information can be included during web page design process.
Where Are Published Contents Stored?
Before a web page can be created, we need to prepare the contents to be used on the web page. These contents could be images to make your web page look nice or they could be web URL links. In the main such content is published BPC Excel reports in HTML or PDF format. These documents are published using the Book Publishing Wizard in the BPC for Excel interface. Depending on the options selected during book publishing, published documents will be saved in different locations and in different formats.
In this wiki we focus on the two most frequently-used types of published documents: HTML and PDF files.
Scenario1: In the Book Publication Wizard, when “Make a Single PDF File” is selected as destination for book as shown in the screenshot below:
User will have options to provide a file name and decide where he/she would like to have this single PDF file stored. If you have chosen to produce reports for 10 Cost Centres, for example, then all 10 Cost Centre reports will be contained in a single PDF file.
There are five different options relating to the production of PDF files, as shown in the screenshot below:
The Local option allows a user to select a designated location for the published file. The other four options will store this single PDF file in a system-defined location. The information below uses CopyApshell and the user ‘BPC_SYSADMIN’ as an example:
Scenario2: When “Planning and Consolidation Web --HTML” and “Planning and Consolidation Web – PDF” are selected and with “Make Single PDF File” un-ticked (as shown in the screenshot below).
In this scenario, users are NOT given options to choose where the published file will be stored. BPC automatically publishes HTML or PDF files into a file server directory. In the example of CopyApShell, the directory is:
D:\PC_MS\Data\FileDB\CopyApshell\PLANNING\TEMPLATE\SECTION\BOOK1.
“TEMPLATE” is the name of book template used for publishing. “BOOK1” is the name of the published report defined in the book template.
BPC will also automatically produce files for the selected Cost Centre and its descendants combined with a single folder for the selected Time period. The selections are obtained from the items selected in the Current View. For instance, if ‘EMEA’ is selected for Cost Centre dimension, the book publishing process will produce a list of folders, one for each of the descendants within the ‘EMEA’ region. (e.g. ‘Germany’, ‘France’, ‘Italy’, etc.). Within each of these folders, you will find a folder for the selected Time period too. In this example is would be ‘2008.total’. Please refer to the screenshots below:
In scenario2, if users to choose to run book publishing by a schedule, the files will not be overwritten for each Cost Centre as long as a different Time is selected.
Create a Web Page
Once contents are created, creating a web page can be started.
Step1: Choose an orientation for the new page. This orientation will determine how contents are arranged on the web page.
Step2: Choose Content Library Objects. The available Library Objects are listed below (taken from the online help):
- Web-Ready Contents, which are the reports that have been published using Planning and Consolidation for Excel interface.
- A Live Reports File, which is a report created from Live Reporting.
- A Document File, which is a document saved to the Content Library.
- A Documents List, which is a list of documents saved to the Content Library.
- A Web site, for which you specify the URL.
This article focuses on the Web-Ready file as it is more complex and the most frequently used type. The rest of the Library Objects are more straightforward.
Step3: In Step3 there are two ways of creating the web-ready contents: file or book. For the file option follow steps within 3.1. For the book option follow steps within 3.2.
There are two options in Web-Ready Contents: ‘Web-Ready File’ and ‘Web-Ready Book’
Web-Ready File allows users to view the single PDF file published in BPC for Excel (corresponding to Scenario1 in the section of “Where published contents are stored”).
Step3.1.1: Drag a Web-Ready File onto the design page. Then provide a name for the web-ready file and select a height value (in pixels) for it.
Step3.1.2: In this step, the Web Page Designer needs to locate the files to use for the web page. These files are published via Book Publishing in BPC for Excel. Corresponding to the four options to store published report/reports during book publishing (discussed in the section of “Where published contents are stored”), users have four folders as shown in the screenshot below.
Files in the App Set folder have the highest level of visibility and are available to all valid users of the Application Set. Files in the Application folder are available to all valid users of an Application (within a specific Application Set). Files in the Team folder are available only to a particular team, as defined in the BPC Security screens in the BPC Administration Console.
Step3.1.3: In this step, users have four options to decide what to do next as shown in the screenshot below.
- “Modify the selected page object” enables users to continue edit the web page.
- “Set access to this Web page” allows users to assign users to this web page. Depending on the content of the web page, single users, multiple users, or groups can be assigned.
- “Preview this Web page” permits user to preview the Web page before saving it.
“Save and show me the finished Web page” will finalise the web page and display the web page at the same time
Step3.1.4: View this single PDF file on the web page.
Web-Ready Book: This object allows a user to use published contents (HTML or multiple PDF files) that are stored in the designated server directory (corresponding to the scenario2 of section “Where published contents are stored”).
3.2.1: Drag the Web-Ready Book onto the design page. Provide a name for this web page and select the size of the page (in pixels)
3.2.2: This step is different to the Web-Ready File. In this step using a Web-Ready Book user can select a template and a section of the template to use as shown in the screenshot below:
3.2.3: In this step, users can select if all the reports are going to be displayed as a list with links to see each individual report or select a specific Cost Centre and Time period to include a single report.
In the previous example of book publishing, eight folders were generated when ‘EMEA’ was selected as the Cost Centre in the Current View. We can make use of the contents published in this previous example.
User access usually is set based on the target audience for the report. The list of reports is usually for consumption by a manager or director who has the rights to access information for the entire region, e.g. the EMEA region. A specific report is usually created for a single Cost Centre manager, and may be specific to the Cost Centres that this manager deals with.
Conclusion
Typically web page design is part of the BPC project’s implementation stage. It should be combined with book publishing and user security setup. This article is not intended as a user guide for web page design, but as information for how to provide enough guidance for users to be able to create their own web page from existing content. If this web page is one-off exercise, creating a single PDF file (Web Read-File) is the preferable option. If users want to view dynamic information, i.e. different books by time and by different cost centre, then a Web Ready Book is a better option, as it will prevent historical books from being over-written.