Business Objects Training

june 2008 e-newsletter

Did you know that your Universe Designer can save you a lot of time by formatting objects for you? This example will show you when object formatting in Designer is beneficial.

TIP: Formatting Objects in Designer

You have a universe that contains several year objects (i.e. fiscal year, calendar year, shipment year, etc). These objects are used in many reports and are defined as numbers in the database. Because they are defined as numbers in the database, every time that they are included in a report, they are displayed with commas and decimals, as shown below:

So, every time you include these objects in a report, you have to format them to remove the commas and decimals.

Let your Designer help:

1. Log in to Designer and open the universe with the year objects.
2. Open the class with the year object.
3. Right-click on the object.  A pop-up menu is displayed:
   
   
   
   
4. Select Object Format…
5. The Object Format dialog box is displayed:
   
   
   
   
6. To change the format for the year object, on the Number tab, select Number in the Category window.
7. In the Format window, select the 0 (zero) format.  This will cause the year to be displayed as four digits (example:  2000).
8. Click the [OK] button.
9. Save, test and export the universe so the enhancements are available to the end-users.

Now, when the end-users use the year object in a report, the year will be displayed as YYYY:

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