Development of Information Sources within IFS Business Reporting & Analysis services is to some extent supported by IFS Developer Studio. The following is supported:
As for all entities a model is developed from which all necessary files are created. The tool supports data access type Online as well as Data Mart but the Data Mart support is currently based on Materialized View snapshot tables. This means that the tool does not support Data Mart access based on incremental load.
For the cases where IFS Developer Studio does not apply, use this page to find template files to be used for the development.
This page can also be used to find some general file templates related Information Sources.
The following general dimension specific templates are available:
This template defines relations between LU entities and Dimension entities. The information is component specific and is used by the Quick Information Source Tool. The tool will try to automatically map standard dimensions when creating a Quick Information Source by using the references in the selected source view. One example is the LU entity Account that has the parent key Company and the key Account. The dimension DIM_ACCOUNT has a parent dimension connected to the Company and a key attribute that represents the account code. So for this case it is natural to define a relation between LU Account and the Account dimension.
The following Data Mart templates are available:
This template defines so called Data Mart Refresh Categories, i.e. refresh containers that can contain references to one or more Data Mart source. A Data Mart source is typically a Materialized View or an Incrementally Loaded table. The purpose with the template is to provide pre-defined categories that are easy to manage when it comes to setting up schedules for refresh of Data Mart sources.
All Data Mart sources in a component should be defined in this component specific file.
The general approach is that a dimension specific Data Mart source is defined in the general category DIM_ALL and a fact specific Data Mart source is defined in a product specific category.
Note: If a fact or a dimension entity supports incremental load there should be no Materialized Views defined for the same entity. In this case the incremental snapshot tables will replace the Materialized Views.
There are no specific templates available related to Incremental Load. However the development section provides necessary examples, either written as part of the documentation or as sample files. Please refer to Incremental Load Development.
The BR Client Navigator feature in Solution Manager is used to customize the IFS Business Reporter specific client navigator. To get a quicker startup where the delivered Information Sources appear in the navigator already after installation, without any customization, each component can define a default folder name to which an Information Source should be connected. It is suggested to use the same folder name for all Information Sources belonging to one product.
The following templates are available: