IFS Business Reporter client tips¶
This section will provide you with some general tips to handle designs and performance of IFS Business Reporter reports.
Report Size¶
The report size can be an important factor.
A customer reporting or presentation requirement can be transformed into a BR report by a BR designer. A rather easy trap to fall into is to create too large reports, i.e. reports with large amounts of BR design instructions as well as ordinary Excel functionality.
So what does “large” mean and what can be the consequences of a large report? A large report can be large in many ways. Normally this is related to design elements and how they are used. Please refer to Design Element Limitations in this section.
A general guideline would be not to use one single BR report to produce contents that could as well be represented by several reports. Assume that a report with 25 design sheets is created and that the executed report contains 40 sheets, due to the use of Sheet Repeaters (i.e. repeating sheets). The single report could maybe be said to correspond to 20-30 separate reports. If another tool than BR was used, there would be say some 20 separate reports. Now only one report is produced. But there is nothing that says that one design sheet corresponds to one report. It is more a matter of making a logical/practical limitation of the report size, trying to come up with a design that is understandable, and maintainable while still producing a report with contents that makes sense, and have value, for the customer.
One problem with a large report is of course the performance expectations. The larger a report gets, the higher the probability that BR will generate more server SQL statements to be executed. This may lead to more time spent on the server side and thus a longer execution time. Many data sets do not necessarily mean that the client will get a large data volume to handle but the possibility certainly increases. The client processing will definitely increase with increased design size. So, a general rule of thumb is to try to keep the individual BR reports rather small.
A list of issues related to large reports:
- Difficult to understand the design
- Difficult to further develop the report
- Difficult to maintain/correct the report
- Easy to create incorrect cell references
- Large amount of named ranges
- Risk for memory problems
- Reduced server performance
- Reduced client rendering performance
- By any chance if the report is corrupted it will be very difficult to create the same report again
Design Element Limitations¶
There are no warnings currently in IFS Business Reporter when it comes to how the report is using the available design features. This type of design awareness functionality will be added in future BR release as one way of highlighting for the designer that it might be necessary to consider redesign.
Below is a table with some recommended max design limits:
Check Point | Suggested MAX limit |
---|---|
Design Sheets | 10 |
Design Rows | 100 |
Design Columns | 50 |
Design Cells | 100 |
No of Client Data Sets | 300 |
No of Server Data Sets | 100 |
If a BR report contains design such that one of the above limits are exceeded, then there is a chance that the report performance may suffer and redesign might be needed.
Note: There is no guarantee that a small amount of design always is a good thing and that a large design is a bad thing. But the above limits at least serve as a guideline, something to look out for.
Check Design Sheet Size¶
Always perform a check in each BR design sheet when it comes to active sheet size. Press
Of course, it is necessary to consider charts etc. that are not BR design elements and that are placed outside the BR design elements.
Performance Indicators¶
The Information Source navigator in IFS Business Reporter has performance indicators that give the designer an idea about the following: - Is an item indexed? - Is an item derived, i.e. is the item retrieved by running a function call or a sub SELECT? - Is there an index definition covering one or more of the columns used to connect a fact with a dimension?
Filter Criteria Handling¶
Try to keep common design criteria on as a high level as possible. This also applies to Advanced Filter Criteria, i.e. common criteria should be defined on the highest possible level since it enables the IFS Business Reporter client to merge data sets and thus reduce the number of data sets sent to the server.
Repeaters¶
The repeater concept in IFS Business Reporter is rather powerful and should be used instead of repeating the design. Please note that the more items that are part of a repeater the, lager is the risk for bad client performance. This is more or less related to the size of the key matrix that has to be built by the client. So try to keep the number of repeater items low.
Also, use sheet repeaters if the purpose is to create reports with the same design that has to be repeated on one specific item. A typical case is to present some financial result per cost center. Then instead of creating on design sheet per cost center, it is much smarter to use a sheet repeater.
Batch Execution¶
Running reports manually via IFS Business Reporter is of course possible but the recommendation is to only do that during the design phase. The recommended way is to run reports in batch mode. There are two possibilities:
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Schedule published IFS Business Reporter reports in IFS Cloud without using IFS Business Reporter Execution Server. The data processing will be done in the server but the Excel/BR reports will not be rendered on the server side. This means that when the report is opened, the rendering will take place and that can be time-consuming. This option has the advantage as the user does not have to wait for the server execution. It is possible to configure that a mail should be sent to the user when the report is ready.
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Install, configure and startup IFS Business Reporter Execution Server (BRES) and then schedule published IFS Business Reporter reports in IFS Cloud. The benefit of this solution is that the BR reports will be completely rendered after being processed by BRES. Thus, if a report is scheduled to run early in the morning, then when opening the report a few hours later it will be completely ready and the startup time is very short. It is also possible to specify that the executed report should not contain any links to IFS Business Reporter, i.e. the executed report is an ordinary Excel report. This is suitable when the receiver of the report does not necessarily have IFS Business Reporter installed.
In addition to the above points, IFS Business Reporter designers can follow the tips given in this document to optimize the performance of IFS Business Reporter. This document contains some useful tips to improve the performance of Microsoft Excel as well. These tips would indirectly improve the performance of IFS Business Reporter.