Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Issues : Migration with LCM in Business Objects BI 4

I will start up with a new category today.. there are many blogs out there on BO any most of them are excellent source of information. So I thought why not start something very unique and personal to me and something that might save time for someone.. I will take the effort as a success if it save more time of someone than the time it took me to write it. Many of these issues took days , weeks to resolve involving several developers. Also I will include some keywords as its very difficult to search and get to the issue other wise.Please comment if you needs any details of these I will be glad to reply.

1. LCM ( Lifecycle Manager ) in BI 4 does not promote all the dependent objects of reports mainly Crystal seamlessly in BI 4 FP1 . Some time the LOVs does not move through some times the Business view does not move, some time Universe or connected even they are selected in the objects to be promoted does not go through. We faced issues for months while migrating from BOXI 3.1 to 4.0. We created bunch of Service Tickets to SAP and and did a lot of cofig changes howeverthe problem hardly resolved.

Resolution :
You have to be very very meticulous while promotion through LCM (although its the only tool available now with BI4 if you discount Upgrade Management Tool UMT ).

1. Create a clean Validation or Pre Dev environment with UMT if there is a migration from BOXI 3.1 to BI 4 is the ultimate goal.
2.Preferable handle Connection separately promote them it the before starting up with any content.
3.Handle the promotion of the Universe and  business views separately through LCM and verify the universe or Business View in the target environment before any report content migration.
4. In case of Business view or Universe with bigger size and many hundred objects you would find in many cased of partial success and if its a partial success it means there are few object never made through. You will find ghost objects in the target environment. In these case carry on the migration with LCM as many times (may be 3-4 times) until the result shows fully success.
5. If the reporting has a lot of dynamic LOVs using Business View in crystal reports handle the LOVs independently. As the reports that are having a large number of dynamic LOV will drop of the LOV from dynamic to static. And you might get a error as Item 1 not found in collection . If you see this error then its a indicator that the migration has some issue.
6.Now once the BVs are promoted there is quite possibility that the data access security is screwed up and it will result in blank LOV , blank crystal reports even report producing blank SQL queries.
7.In case of BV make sure all the objects in the data foundation and business element has correct data access rights. We had to enable the data access right to everyone for most of the LOV and BV. Also there would be cased where the object right will not be correctly inherited to the child objects and you have to setup rights for all child objects. This is most likely a bug for now.I found this after lot of experiment with Business View manager
8. Now once all these done and in place start the migration of reports and contents. Again there would be cases where there will be partial success. Remember to try multiple times until they are succeed.
9. Now you are ready to go but you might face quite a few weird issue inbetween in CMC and in the report itself. Like issue with cache sever and many reporting anomalies. Now thats a topic for later post , till then CYA...
   

2 comments:

  1. What tool should we use to Migrate from xi 3.1 to BO 4.0? LCM or Upgrade Manager.

    For Promotion(“Transport content from like
    system to like system”) we can use LCM and for
    For Migration(“Transport and transform content
    from a previous platform to a new platform
    or architecture”) we can use Upgrade Manager.

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    Replies
    1. The only tool that can be used to migrate from 3.1 to 4.0 is UMT. The LCM can only be used for promotion from one 4.0 environment like Dev to 4.0 QA.

      Looks like you are correct already in your understanding.

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