All You Need To Know About Webi Shared Elements

Version needed to use this feature: SAP BI 4.2 SP3 +

Benefits and Uses

• The main objective of Shared Elements is to simplify report creation by saving and reusing commonly used, or highly formatted, report blocks, charts geomaps, custom elements, embedded pictures, categories, and comments.
• Another use case could be made for highly complex queries such as queries containing many conditions, multiple sub-queries or unions. In addition, a new automatic cleaning mechanism that remove useless queries whenever a shared element is added to a report to increase overall performance.

Note : To work with shared elements, you must be connected to the CMS repository. Depending on the mode you are in, several tasks can be disabled.

Creating shared element

1. Open Existing Web intelligence report or Create new report
2. In Design mode, right-click a report element and click Linking  Save as Shared element  or in the toolbar, click  Shared Element  Save as .

3. Enter a name for the shared element.
4. Browse the location where you want to save the shared element.

Use shared element in a Report

1. Create a new report and open existing report. In left panel you will Share element Icon click on it to see the folder structure
2. In the Shared Elements pane in the Side Panel, click Browse to navigate to the location of the shared element you want to insert and select it.

3. Drag it on the report page and drop it where you want it to be displayed.
4. In the HTML interface, if you use the search functionality to select a shared element, you cannot use the drag and drop to place the shared element on the report page. To insert it, right-click it and click Insert.

Shared element updates

1. When you insert a shared element in a document, Web Intelligence creates a link between the shared element and the document. The content of the shared element however is not automatically updated if a new version is available
2. Whenever the shared element is updated in the CMS repository, the document in which the shared element has been copied is no longer up to date. To make sure that you always use the latest version of a shared element in your document, update the shared element content in the document.

  Note: Only one version of a shared element can be linked to a document.

To update a shared element automatically

1. You can automatically update shared elements each time you open the document by enabling the option Update shared element(s) on open. As a result, the update icon in the Shared Elements pane is not displayed since the document already contains the latest revisions of the shared elements.
2. In the Properties tab, click Document.

3. Enable the option Update shared element(s) on open..

4. If you do not want to keep the modifications between the latest version of a shared element in the CMS repository and its copy in a document, to track changes for instance, unlink the shared element from the document.

To update a shared element manually

1. You can check for new versions of the shared elements contained in your document to update them.
2. Select a shared element.
3. In the Shared Elements pane, click Check New Revisions.
4. An icon is displayed if a new version of the shared element used in the document is available
5. In the Shared Elements pane of the Side Panel, in the Currently Used menu, check the box(es) of the shared element(s) you want to update.
6. Click Update in the toolbar to update the shared element(s) you have selected.

Results

If an error icon  appears after the update process, it means that the shared element(s) you have selected cannot be found in the CMS repository