Non Empty Behavior is a very good optimization method you can use with your calculated measures. It allows you to define a list of measures that their emptiness defines the emptiness of your calculated measure. To understand this, look at the picture (taken from the MSDN):

This is the calculation expressions pane from the Calculations tab in the cube designer. From MSDN:

"The measures you specify in the Non-empty behavior list are used to resolve NON EMPTY queries in MDX. When you specify one or more measures in the Non-empty behavior list, Analysis Services treats the calculated member as empty if all the specified measures are empty. If the Non-empty behavior property is blank, Analysis Services must evaluate the calculated member itself to determine whether the member is empty."

This is not new. NEB is quite old feature in SSAS. The new thing (at least for me) is that NEB can also be used in Panorama formulas! For example, M1+M2 /*NONEMPTY_BEHAVIOR={M1,M2}*/ will apply M1 & M2 as NEB. You can see more Panorama optimization methods here.

Panorama views with parameters are very common wherever mass Panorama-based development is made. Some use it within websites and others let the users change the parameters using Panorama WebAccess. When using such views within websites, a common thing that we do is to change those parameters ourselves using the Panorama SDK, where the values are based on the current status of the user, the current time or other parameters which come from outer source such as XML files, Databases, etc.

The main challenge when using parameters within web sites is that you must think of end cases for the parameters' values. When you send a bad parameter to a view using the SDK, the view will sometimes go off and it will stop responding to other things you may do with it in the website. I'll describe it with a life-experience example: We've built a website with panorama paramertized views. Some of the views had FromDate and ToDate parameters, which define the time period for the view to be sliced on. By the way, this is in fact an error by itself - we can use other dedicated functions to do that as described here. The source of these parameters came from a database. The values inside the DB were given from a power user which is the only one who can change them. In some cases, the power user changed these values and the views weren't sliced at all. Debugging it, we've seen that the period between FromDate and ToDate has no data at all so the view wasn't changed. The problem was that once the view was trying to slice on empty period and failed, it stopped responding to other actions (it can be also changed from other controls on the page). So again - think of the end cases when you create parameters-based views.

What I written so far is easy to say, but sometimes you have to do it. The views have to have parameters and sometimes they will get bad data from the users. We have no control over it and we can't deny it. What can we do? A simple approach I use from time to time is to create shadow views. A shadow view is a hidden view (or 1x1 pixel sized) that cannot be seen by the user. Everything that the user tries to do on the real view will be tested before that on runtime on the shadow view. Only if the action succeeded on the shadow view it will be made on the real view. Otherwise, no action will be made on the real view and instead the user will get a message (using Javascript's alert() function, for example) describing why his request cannot be made. The way to check if the user's action succeeded on the shadow view is using output from Panorama SDK functions, but this subject is a little bit wider for this post and it's very case-specific. There are no generic solutions for this problem that I know of, but if I'll find something I'll write another post about it.

To conclude: Think twice about end cases when using parameters inside your views. If you have no choice use the shadow view approach. Write and run tests to check the different values that you'll send to your views.

Make sure that all the Panorama developers has the same version of Panorama NovaView Desktop and that it's the same version of the Panorama server. In addition, check that all the Panorama servers (meaning development server, production server, etc.) also have the same Panorama version. It's very unpleasant when you copy the views from the development server to the production server while installing your new or updated BI project just to find out that some of the views don't show because of that. That's right - it won't cause all of the views to malfunction, it will only affect some. That's the dangerous thing and this is why you need to double check it immiedetly.

in my last post I recommended you to learn about the batch mode feature of Panorama. There's one more thing you've got to know: Check you're code flow very well because if you'll use batch mode within batch mode, meaning that you'll call the EnterBatchCommandMode function after you did it previously, the view will get stuck. Be sure that you don't have such a case.

The solution is to make the parameters update in one action. There are two ways of doing this:
The first one is to use the CallUpdateParametersEx with number of parameters. You can update many parameters in one function call (look in the SDK documentation). The problem with this solution is that the code is not readable.
The second and better solution is to use the EnterBatchCommandMode and LeaveBatchCommandMode functions to make the parameters update in one transaction. This way, the code is much more readable. You can update every parameter in its own CallUpdateParametersEx call. The usage of this function is very simple: Call the EnterBatchCommandMode function before the parameters update and call the LeaveBatchCommandMode after that.

I'm sure that there are more scenarios where this concept can be helpful, so it's important to get familiar with.

• You should always check that the view is loaded with data. Sometimes it will be loaded with no data because of lack of data in the DWH or because the view is sliced on a member with no data. It confuses the applet and from that point it won't always continue to function. From Dashboards developer point of view, if the view is loaded with no data, replace the view with a descriptive message. Dashboard page with "No Data" message will make the users think that something is very wrong with the BI system.
• Panorama has some issues with formats. Define the formats in the OLAP. Panorama will use them as defined in the OLAP.
• Avoid as much as you can from sending parameters to views. When adding parameter to the view, think twice if you have a way of getting this parameter's data from the OLAP. You'll be suprised to find out that in many cases you'll be able to do that.
• If you slice your view as a result of a user event, try not to use parameters. Try to use the callFilterGridMembers function or callSliceByMember function.
• Slicing a view on a member which has no data can cause the view to stop working. What you can do is to create a hidden view (1 pixel x 1 pixel) which is the same as the first view. Whenever you want to slice the view, make the slicing on the hidden view first. Using the Panorama's SDK, find if the view has data and only then slice the original view.

That's why Panorama's default setting for "Auto Select all X-axis Members to Chart" (and Y) is false, meaning that the chart won't expand even if new data arrives.

A wonderful idea I heard of is to turn to full screen mode in Internet Explorer when entering the Dashboard site. It can make a better user experience. Try it yourself and you'll see the huge difference.
How will we do that? We will add a JavaScript code to the first page of the dashboards site and after that we'll ask our system administrator to enable this script for us. Let's get to work:

Step 1 - The JavaScript

It will simulate the user hitting the F11 key which will turn the IE to fullscreen mode. The only problem is that when viewing the page, you'll see this message:

This takes us to step 2.

Step 2 - Enabling ActiveX

First, I'll show you how to do this on your local maching and then you'll ask your system administrator to enable it on all the machines in the organization using distribution. Enter the Tools menu in IE and hit Internet Options. Click on the Security tab and make sure the "Trusted Sites" zone is selected. Note that the Panorama Dashboards site is already defined as trusted site (if the initial installation of Panorama Dashboards made according to the installation manual. If it's not, you have a problem). Click on "Custom Level" and Enable the "Initialize and script ActiveX ..." option:

Now, you'll see that there's no promting for ActiveX controls. Show this to your sys admin and ask him to make this happen on every user's machine (using distribution, of course). As I said, the dashboards site is a trusted site so I can't see any problem to enable this. The result is very beautiful and can make a lot of users happy. Note that you can also add a button in your page that will call the same script in order to return to normal mode.

Enjoy.

When adding parameters to your view, you'll see that they appear in the upper-left corner of the grid/crosstab. In the NovaView Desktop program it can be tolerated, but in the Web Access or in the Dashboards web site it cannot be. It's very annoying and we can't let the users see our inside use of the parameters. What can we do?

The solution is very simple: We need to change the skin of the view/dashboards page/dashboards site (depends on how you work) and make the grid corner font's color identical to the color of the grid's background. That way, the users will not see the text in the grid's corner. The way of doing it is also not hard:

Remember: Always backup your files before modifying them. In the panorama folder, enter E-BI/Config/Skins and enter your skin's folder. In the classic way of work, you're using the default skin which can be changed in the Dashboards settings section. I recommend you to make a new skin out from the default one (see here), update the skin's name in the Dashboards settings section and not touching the default skin itself. In your new skin, change the GridCornerFont setting so that its color will be the color of the grid's corner's background. You can see the color of the grid's corner in the GridTopLeftBackground setting. For example, if GridTopLeftBackground=(194,210,226), then if you set GridCornerFont=((Arial,1,R),(194,210,226)) then no-one will see the text over there.

Enjoy.

A new desire came from one of our customers. The request was to have the ability to search in Panorama Crosstab. The first solution I thought of was searching the grid in iterative way and it worked fine using the Panorama SDK. After that, my friend Boris came with another simple and elegant solution: We can use Parameter in the Panorama view and highlight the number which was defined in the parameter. In this post I'll explain how to implement this.

1. Create a new view using Panorama NovaView Desktop and make sure you see the grid in the view.

2. Define a new parameter: Click on View -> Paramaters, and click on the "Manage Parameters" button. Click on Add. The default type is Number and this is exactly what wee need (for now). In the name, type Highlight and in the Default Value type a number that you see in the grid (this is the number that will be highlighted later). Let's take 0 for example. Click on OK twice and close the little Parameters window.

3. Create a new Exception: Click on Data -> Exceptions -> Exceptions... -> Add. Click on Next and then choose "Custom Exception". Click on "Edit Exception" and there write the following formula: [Measures].CurrentMember = [[Highlight]]
This will simply select all the cells with the number that we defined earlier in the Highlight parameter. Click on OK and click Next. In this step, define the style of the highlighted cells. I picked red color and Bold font style. You can click on Finish now and then click OK. Open the small Parameters window (right click in the crosstab's corner and choose Parameters) and click on "Apply Changes". Now, you will see that all the cells with 0 are highlighted. If you don't see it, check that you did all the steps correctly.

4. When we will show the view to the user, we don't want to show him anything highlighed when the view is loaded. This is where a little trick takes place: open the small Parameters window (right click in the crosstab's corner and choose Parameters), double click on the Highlight parameter. Choose String as the parameter type (on the right part) and in the Default value, enter abc. Click twice on OK and then on the apply button and you'll see that now the highlighed cells are regular ones.

5. In the dashboards page, or in the web page you created using the Panorama SDK, create a button that will call the function searchGrid. Just add the button the property onclick="searchGrid('master')", where master is the applet's name. this is the code of the searchGrid function:

function searchGrid (applet) {
var reply = prompt('Please enter the number to search','');
eval(applet + '.CallUpdateParametersEx("P|~|Highlight|~|' + reply + '|~~|")');
}

• You can search all the views in the current web/dashboard page. Just call the function for every applet, but make it in Batch mode.
• You can search all the grid even if the user doesn't see all the rows. You can tell him if the number he searched for is in there or not.

That's all. Test your new page and enjoy. For every question about this and anything else, you can leave a comment or write my mail.

When you develope a big Panorama Dashboards site, you'll have a lot of javascript code in the background. We use JS to call the Panorama SDK functions and methods, make the server side and the client side work together and to make the website dynamic and user-friendly. After few days, you'll see that you have a lot of code out there, so you must organize it (if you didn't do it in the first place). My friend Doron wrote a great post about JS development guidelines which can help Panorama Dashboards developers and any big website developers.

We're now beginning a quick session of Panorama Dashboard development using the 5.5 version. The Dashboard site is written in ASP, so it seems very native to write our custom code also in ASP. On the other hand, writing in C# is much more fun, so we decided to try and see if we can make the server side code be in C#. We found that it is indeed possible. You can place an iframe with ASP.NET page and reference the dashboard page from it using JavaScript (start from page.parent and go on from there).

This way you can enjoy the two worlds. In the next posts I'll show some examples of what you can do using this method.

Here are some tips we collected over the years about dashboard design:

Page Layout

• Less is more - don't put too many views in the page.
• Rule of thumb - no more than five reports in one page.
• Don't use scrolling - the average user won't scroll down the screen.
• Position in screen - some researches made about this subject and here are the recommendations:
• Top-Left - it's the part of the screen that the user looks at first. Put there the most important data.
• Center of the screen - the part the user looks after the top-left. Put there the second-most important data.
• Top-Right, Bottom-Left - Neutral parts.
• Bottom-Right - The user won't pay attention to it, don't put there important data.
• Fixed menus in every page.
• Small amount of navigation targets in every page. Too much navigation paths will cause confusion.
• Concentrate on the main page - in 90% of the cases the user will stay there.
• Add graphic components and highlight them if necessary.
• Blue color only to links (and underline, of course).

Views Layout

• Two digits after the decimal point - in non-integer number, put only two digits after the decimal point. The human mind can't understand more than that.
• Focus on the clarity of the data and not only on its beauty. For example, 3D pie charts are very beautiful, but flatting them will make them more clear to the user.
• Measures have meaning only when compared to other data. Don't put stand-alone measure.
• Pay attention to graphical change between the data and not only colors. Remember that there are color-blind users.
• Text is more clear than icons.
• Use the San Serif and Arial fonts. They are the most readable to the user.
• Align the text only to one side and not to the middle. It seems better to programmers, but users want their text aligned to the left or to the right.
• Colors - don't use too much color. The dashboard page is not a jungle. Use colors of the same family.
• Put dark text on bright background the vise versa.

And to conclude - use CSS whenever you can. It will save you much time and effort.

In many cases, extraction of Panorama view's MDX code is necessary. For example, in order to check whether the performance bottleneck is in Panorama or in the OLAP server, you can take the MDX code, run it in SQL Server Management Studio and compare run times. You can take it further more but I'll leave it for future posts.

In Panorama Desktop program, click on Tools -> Direct MDX... and then CTRL + ALT + V. Then, you can copy it and use it in any way you want.

In some of our projects, we develop the Panorama views in the development environment along with the Data Warehouse, the ETL, the Cubes, etc. That's because the customers want to see how their product will look like before we deploy the views in the production environment. So, how do you deploy Panorama views from one environment to the other?

1. Create the new book - If it's a new briefing book, create it using the Panorama NovaView Administrator program. If it's already exist you can skip this step.
2. Copy the content - The book's content is by default in c:\<Panorama Folder>\E-BI\books\<Book Name>. Copy the content of this directory from the dev machine to the production machine. This is not enought because the views are still looking at the dev environment, so:
3. Change the view's properties - You need to have a very simple program (let's call it PanoramaDeployUtil) that iterates over all the views in the given folder (and its sub folders, recursively) and change its properties. I recommend opening the view's file using xml reader and change the element \pnView\Root\Cube\Properties. You need to set its properties CubeAddress, CubeName & CubeDB according to the new environment's values (CubeAddress is the server address). Just run this program and the views will look at the new environment.
4. Check - check yourself and make sure everything is ok by opening Panorama Web Access or Panorama Desktop and see that the values shown are the production's values.

Know that you can always open the Panorama Desktop and change the views one by one by hand.

Enjoy.

1. The Analytics - This is the main issue for my organization, so here I expected to see some new & cool features, but all I've seen is only facelift. This is probably why the new version is 5.5 and not NovaView 6.
2. The Google stuff - While this is not relevant for my organization, this was very cool and promising. I think that this relation between Panorama and Google will carry on and both sides will only benefit from it.

• Take the led's value from the view and show it in the tooltip
• Take the led's color from the view and let the user filter the map according to the desired color(s)
• Take the led's view path and after clicking the view, show the related views (the departments' views)

• The leds map is simply a web site, meaning zero-footprint in the client's computer. Some computers in my company has java compatibility problems, so I added a parameter you can send with the site's URL which changes the applet's java version (see more in the next post, which will be more technical).
• The leds map has to be small, about a quarter of the screen. That's because it's intended to be a part of the CEO's desktop.
  
• When the map loads, a picture with a turning-around The Thinker statue is shown with a "Loading" message below (our CEO loves that statue...).
• After the map has been loaded, the user sees two axis with the leds in them. The two axis can represent any Meta-Measures you'd like: Short-Term Profit Vs. Long-Term Profit, Client's Satisfaction Vs. Company's Profit, etc. This is a point that many people have difficulty to understand, so I'll give an example: The yellow led is in the top-right corner, so that says that the underlying measure is very important in both the meta-measures. Going on with the example, that says that this measure is very important for theClient's Satisfaction and for the Company's Profit. Note that the leds never move. Only their color changes.
• When you move the cursor on a measure in the map, a small tooltip appears next to it. The tooltip shows the measure's name and its value (You can see it in the left-bottom led). Design Change:As my team master recommended, now each led has its measure's name above it. The tooltip shows only the value.
• When the map loads, only the red leds are shown. In the top-left corner of the screen, there's three radio buttons which filters the shown leds by their colors. In the picture, all the leds are shown because all the radio buttons are enabled.
• Clicking on a measure on the map drills-down to the different department's leds, as you can see in the left side of the picture.
• Clicking on a department's led makes the map to vanish and instead of it there's a drill-down of the department, meaning that the measures of its sub-departments are shown instead of the map.
  
• After the last drill-down was made, there are two possible actions: Close the new view and return to the map or open the new view in full screen, where you can slice-and-dice and play with the data.

Although SSAS willl let you use them, some other application such as Panorama won't function properly. I'll give one example: When you perform Drillthrough in Panorama, on the fly the engine gererates a web page that will take the user to the next view. The next view will be sliced as the current view, so this web page needs to pass the dimensions parameter (meaning - the current slices). That's why this web page contains this line:

AttachParameters("Slicers","%Slicers%")

A big problem will occur if one of the sliced dimensions will be sliced on a member with a name that contains inverted commas ("). The JavaScript will result an error because there are three inverted commas in the second parameter of the line. This is only one example of what can happen in a BI consumer program if you'll use special characters in member names. So - be careful not to pass these characters from the DW (build the ETL so it will drop these characters) or giving those names in SSAS, such as the All member name.

The Panorama NovaView Desktop program can't always deal with huge crossjoins. The reason is that this program is written in VB6 - very old platform for client programs. One thing you can try is to go to the crosstab properties and in the Advanced tab, click on the "Optimize huge crossjoins". The problem is that this won't always help. The best solutions I've found so far is to go to the Web Access site (or click on the IE button in the desktop program) and there you can choose the size of the chunk of data you'll receive on every click. Starting with 100 rows in the first chunk, this may help you with huge crossjoins.

My team master Yaron asked me to check some things in the Panorama Dashboards:

Here are the answers. I think that the second answer is a beautiful one. In fact, I really enjoyed while I thought how to do this.

1. This is simple: Just use the Goal hand as the second hand. In the KPI Wizard go to the Define Goal step and choose Custom formula. Enter the measure you want to see in the second hand.

2. This is beautiful: In the KPI Wizard, go to the Finish step and to the Title part. Click on the little blue arrow and click on "Edit MDX...". Then, write this MDX:

Note that:

• This solution may apply to other BI applications, not only to Panorama.
• This way you can show many values and data, not only two values.
• What the Generate function doing there? The '+' operator needs to have two strings in both sides, so writing only the [Measures].[First Measure] or [Measures].[First Measure].Value will return a numeric value which will cause error. The Generate function used this way will return a string. It generates for the set (which contains only our member) the value of the measure (in the second argument of the formula) and as mentioned, returns it as string.
• '\n' will jump to the next line

I never thought of it until one of my users said it. Sorting the KPI can be a very good idea. Instead of always having the same indicators (gauges, traffic lights, etc.) in the same position of the screen, sorting it can make the viewer expect that the most relevant indicator will be placed in the top-left corner of the screen, the second most-relevant will be placed after it, etc.

Sorting the KPI is a very easy thing. Every end user, even with no clue in MDX can do it by following this:

In the Define KPI wizard, go to the "Select Set" step. Copy the current set. For the example, let's say that the current set is [Products].Members and you want to sort it according to the Sales measure in descending order. Click on the advanced button on the right of the set (The button with the "..." on it) and enter the following MDX statement:

Order([Products].Members, [Measures].[Sales], DESC)

If you want to order in ascending order you can replace the DESC with ASC or not to mention it at all.

If you see "No Data" after you entered a view with defined KPI, most chances that the reason has something to do with privileges, but today I've seen one more thing you can do that will make the KPI go crazy.

One of my users built a view and he removed all the measures but one. After that, when he defined the set of his KPI, he chose the set of the measures. That caused the "No Data" title when he wanted to see his KPI view.

One of my users had a very weird problem today. When he entered a view with KPI gauges, he could see everything but the gauges. All was there: The titles, numbers, etc. but the gauges itself. The problem occurred in the Panorama Web Access site and also in the dashboard site. I checked with other users and they didn't have this problem (with the same views, of course).

After a few minutes I found the problem: The Explorer process in windows used too much memory and it caused visual problems in the browser. I ended the process, restarted it (Ctrl + Shift + Esc -> File -> New task -> explorer) and everything went back to normal.

Important note: The user working with Panorama NovaView Desktop must have write privileges on the Panorama folder (The default is: C:\Program files\Panorama). The program saves its data there, so it will cause many troubles if it won't be able to save. For example, when you start the program and click on the globe (work on briefing book from the server) you'll have to enter the panorama's server name every time you start the program (if you don't have the mentioned privilege).

Don't worry: The user watching the views doesn't need to have any privilege on its computer. He only needs the right to see the view or the dashboard page.

It seems that four days before I wrote my post about Panorama Hidden Settings, Panorama entered all the registry keys into their knowledge base. You can find them here. Strage: I seeked it for a long time and now I see that it was always there, under my nose.

1. Follow this link to learn how to do this.
2. Do NOT start working before you backup your E-BI/KPI folder !
3. I recommend using Notepad++ or another good XML editor when writing in the XML files. Otherwise, you can mix the whole file and you'll have to start all over again.

• In the Panorama Web Access web site, by default a user can  save his views (after he made his modifications) only in his private book. To enable him save his views in the Briefing Book (which means - the public book), do the following: Inside the Panorama server, open the Registry Editor (Start -> Run -> regedit) and go to the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Panorama\Nova View 5\Admin. Add a new string value named "PublicBookAdmin". As its value, enter all the users you want to give them the option to save their views in the Briefing Book by this template: <User1Domain>\<User1Name>,<User2Domain>\<User2Name>, etc. For example: panoramaDevServer\PowerUser, MSHOME\Miky.
• The subscriptions web part will show you only the views that you registered to, but by default no one can register himself to the views. What you need to do is to open the Registry Editor in the panorama server, go to the same path as mentioned above and add a string value named "ShowSubsAndAlerts" with the value 1. After that, every user will be able to right click on any view in the Panorama Web Access web site, click on Register and it will be added to the subscriptions web part for him.
  
• For some users, the loading animations which are shown before every applet appears in the Dashboard website will stay forever, meaning that the user will never see the dashboard itself. I think this has something to do with the Java or Microsoft VM of the user. Anyway, a nice workaround is to cancel this animation. To do this, enter the path C:\Program Files\Panorama\E-BI\Dashboard\include (replace the beginning if you installed to panorama software in a different location) and inside the Config.asp file, change the constant "ShowAnimationWhileLoadingApplets" value to false. This is a good workaroung because anyway, the applets should appear in a second or two. Otherwise - buy a faster server.
  

For some weeks we were fighting with (or against?) the Panorama software in order to make it work right and show a nice pilot of BI dashboard screen to our managers. After three weeks we managed to show a good opening position by building a nice dashboard screen including a map, graphs, gauges and crosstabs.

I found that the installation of the SQL Server and the Panorama server was not good enough in my company, so I decided to try it for myself. The installation of the SQL Server is quite easy (Next, Next, Next ...), but installing the Panorama server is a complicated process. Paying attention to so many small details, knowing and remembering what to do inside the Windows server, IIS, Windows services, Windows registry and more is not so easy. Finally, after two days I managed to do this. Now I know that some things in the installation in my work place were not so good and I can point them out.

You can see the exciting (for me, at least) result in this picture, as it is a nice dashboard taken from my screen. Many posts about Panorama and SQL Server 2005 will come ahead. Now I can relax - Panorama is on the way...