Maintenance of Jaspersoft

[Legacy User]

Hi all,

 

Would like to here your thoughts about the following.

I created a Rest based program to read all users in Clarity with Advanced reporting rights and their groups attached.

With this information I create Roles and Folders in Jaspersoft and assign rights.

Example:

User Elwin has group project manager and resource manager.

In jaspersoft 2 roles are created: Project manager and resoucemanager and 2 folder named Projectmanager and Resourcemanager on which the roles have read/write/delete right.

 

Visual:

User Elwin sees:

CA_PPM/reports (ONLY read only right on this folder)

Custom/Resourcemanager (ONLY role resourcemanager has all rights)

Custom/Projectmanager (ONLY role projectmanager has all rights)

 

When user Elwin would like to schedule a report a copy must be made of the report in the folder he likes to have it.

Based on this copy options and schedule are defined.

 

What happens if there is a new version of the report?

- as far I can find you need to copy the report again and maybe define again schedule and option lists.......

This is in my opion not real handy when compared to the old reports and jobs functionality.

 

Are I missing something?###

How are you handle this in your organisation?

[Robert_Ensinger]

When user Elwin would like to schedule a report a copy must be made of the report in the folder he likes to have it.

Why must Elwin copy? Our users schedule directly on the report and output to their user folder or, most often, attach or embed to email. It's possible we're doing it wrong as well so I'll remain curious.

[Legacy User]

Hi Robert,

 

We never do wrong, we look for best practices ;-)

 

The reason of the copy is due to the fact we don't want this folder polluted with all kinds of list and schedules.

We have 1 report which is available for all projectmanagers which are a couple of hunderd. You can imagine what will happen if everybody can create their own list and schedule in one folder.

 

Therefore we have these special folders per security group.

[Robert_Ensinger]

Maybe it's something different with the way we both have permissions setup, but my users can only see their own schedules, so their user experience is pretty clean. It's only my administrator account that 'sees all'. We've decided that downside of copying reports is greater than the cleanliness of my UI.

[Legacy User]

Could you share your folder settings, I'm curious about this solution, we still need the folders for the ad hoc reports, but this will save a lot when updating a report definition.

[Robert_Ensinger]

Sorry - crunched for time. It's best if I bite off small pieces.

About Us: Small, On Premise 14.3 implementation with mature Business Objects environment & reports. Users schedule reports in CA PPM, we run bulk scheduled reports out of Business Objects as well as Report Bursting. Functionally I need to meet these requirements before we can go 'all in' on Jaspersoft. CA PPM with Jaspersoft simply doesn't meet these requirements today. That said, we are seeing incremental enhancements in Jaspersoft Releases and CA has opportunity to build capability as well. Being small and somewhat satisfied with BO - we have the ability to 'sit and wait' in 14.3 with both report servers while hopefully some of these requirements get addressed and I get time to build solutions.

Examples:

Integrate Jaspersoft reports in CA PPM

Automated removal of reports saved by users in Jaspersoft after X days

Hierarchical OBS Browse Input Control in Jaspersoft (Advanced Reporting)

 

I don't want to implement something that is simply working around a limitation and adds upgradability challenges.

 

As I understand it, copying reports is working around the limitation of users not being able to easily save parameters & schedules that are their user in scope - like we're accustomed to in the old reports interface?

As I understand it, copying reports creates a new instance of the report breaking the ability for a user to automagically get fixes & enhancements to reports?

 

The last 14.3 fixpack had two report fixes:

 

I don't feel reports are stable enough yet (as shown above), and CA/Jaspersoft are still working the limitations. If you were on the Rego Jaspersoft 6.2.1 webinar the other day - here's the new Master Schedule interface in Jaspersoft 6.2.

 

Smart people know the business problems to solve. Above demonstrates that good smart people are working them and I hope & trust they keep working them. We have the luxury of waiting this out a bit, therefore I am not encouraging/architecting for copying reports at this time. Valuing upgradability we are encouraging & training scheduling reports with parameters. We hope this will allow us to upgrade both Jaspersoft and the report content as fixes & enhancements come out without breaking the user's schedules.

 

I'll get to my permissions setup next week.

 

Again, not saying this is right - this is simply the decision we've made that seems 'good enough' for us for now while we wait for the Jaspersoft solution to mature a bit more and see what shakes out. Not being CA's own tool I understand their challenges here as well. If I was a leader at an Enterprise Software company with no in house BI offerings and a history of buying my way into new markets - this would interest me.

 

HTH.

[Robert_Ensinger]

In PPM I'm only granting:

 

In Advanced Reporting I'm only adding the CSK_ROLE_ALL_REPORT_DOMAINS

[Legacy User]

Thanks for the answer, we are also looking to have a working solution with as less maintenance as possible.

Copying to schedule is a workaround I don't like and therefore this thread.

What Jaspersoft does is create a new copy of the report (looking via Studio you can see) so with a new version you have an issue.

A pitty is that Jaspersoft is to immature right now compared to BO, although BO has his 'special' behavoir it was more end user focussed in creating reports. At the other side, the backwards compatibilty is great however removing and adding a database schema is back to stone ages, upgrade is not possible you need to reinstall jaspersoft.

Also the way jaspersoft is adding new functionality quicky is better then only the BO fixes provided.

Regarding the OOTB reports I consider them as technical example. Putting effort in building a new report is much more efficient.

We need to wait what the future will bring, currently I advice upgrade to 14.3 and rebuild and test reports in Jaspersoft, or keep using my BO Quickstarter universe on a BO hosting environment detached from Clarity.

[Legacy User]

From the Tableau Software "official site" (Tableau): 

 

Storytelling has gotten WF in a big heap of trouble!