I am not real techie here so forgive me if I describe this w...

[robert fuschetto]

I am not real techie here so forgive me if I describe this wrong

While we use our WF portal for dashboarding using the IBI software, we also try to use it as a one stop shop for all reporting. We us our IBI/WF portal to point to various content:

Sharepoint Sites

SAP Webi Reports

Tableau Reports

Excel/Word files stored locally on a mapped share

We are still on IE but will need to make the move to EDGE.

While testing 8207v28 under EDGE we immediately noticed that our links to MicroSoft Excel/Word content no longer works. Ex: We hade a hyperlink to J:LVPGReporting

I understand this is by design, something to do with the CHROMIUM engine that EDGE and CHROME use.

IBI says it not there issue.

Our IS has not found a way t make this work yet. They said Microsoft had some work arounds, though no have worked thus far.

Again, I am not too techie here but surely there is a way to get at these files through the WF portalNo I mean its a portal!

Any suggestions, I cant believe we are alone in this

[Martin Yergeau]

I am not that techie also but I am facing the same issue and its not yet 100% solved.

The problem is that with EDGE Chromium (and any modern browsers) EVERYTHING is web based.

In other words, referencing a local drive (J:LVPGReporting) does not exist for the web.

It has to be an url reference.

But the other issue that you may (and certainly) face is the security where an external provider (the web thru WebFOCUS) is trying to access a file on your network.

I would like to give you the magic potion, but I have not yet been able to find it and as you stated, this is not a TechSupport problem.

[robert fuschetto]

we are looking for suggestions / solutionswork arounds etcthanks.

[Martin Yergeau]

This is what I understood, but as mentioned, I am not able to give you the magic potion formula, I am still waiting for.

Panoramix still not want to share his secret, even under torture

[SATHEESH B]

Local file linking is security issue and it wont work anymore. If you are on windows you can create virtual directory or FTP site and map your network drive . They will give you option to view it as directory and create a link . I am not sure if we map the network drive as app folder in WF server and access the same way as IIS using url (/approot/appfolder/file_name )

[robert fuschetto]

I will pass this on. In this circumstance, will my VBA code that opens and refreshes these files still work. We were try to get the Excel files on a sharepoint site but we have run into file size issues.

[robert fuschetto]

As an update

I would suspect others should be having this issuebut maybe it is just us

Anyway, our thought was to port our share files to a SharePoint site. We have some stuff in SharePoint already and WF seems to have no issues opening it. We finally got the SAVE AS syntax down pat. We needed this for the VBA that opens excel files, refreshes and saves each week. However, SharePoint appears to have a size limitation on how a big a file you may upload or saveand some of our PowerPivots are huge.

Backto square 1.

Satheesh, I do not really follow your idea but I sent it to ISI am not really sure if this is something they must do or I.

I continue to be open to direction or ideas though. This is a showstopper for us in terms of using our WF portalit may not be an IBI issue, but if we must moved to some sort of new portal, it devalues the software in many eyes. So we continue to hope there is some way to circumvent all this.

[John Edwards 2]

So the browser doesnt have permission to grab files on the local machine unless you explicitly tell it to grab one. Even if it did you wouldnt have the WF Server on the local machine to process data from it.

But!

You can write a small jsp routine that offers the end-user the opportunity to upload a file to the server for processing. More or less, you present a page that has a Select File button on it, the user navigates to local folders and highlights the file they want to include. Click OK, up it goes, the file moves to the server for a second WF request that uses that file for Reporting. At that point, the desired file is present on the server, and WF Client and Server can go to town on it. You can have WF discard the file when the work is done.

You can find examples on the web that are super-easy, and more or less a cut-and-paste for you. You might need a jsp person to assist, but its likely you can self-learn this well enough to make it work.

I use this to allow workers that get files in their email to upload them for Data Migrator data-import routines.

P.S. Sharepoint is evil. But you already know that.

[robert fuschetto]

john.edwards:

 

You can write a small jsp routine that offers the end-user the opportunity to upload a file to the server for processing. More or less, you present a page that has a Select File button on it, the user navigates to local folders and highlights the file they want to include. Click OK, up it goes, the file moves to the server for a second WF request that uses that file for Reporting. At that point, the desired file is present on the server, and WF Client and Server can go to town on it. You can have WF discard the file when the work is done.

 

 

John,

I really appreciate the thoughtsI can not believe there are not more folks up in arms over this.

RE:

You can write a small jsp routine that offers the end-user the opportunity to upload a file to the server for processing. More or less, you present a page that has a Select File button on it, the user navigates to local folders and highlights the file they want to include. Click OK, up it goes, the file moves to the server for a second WF request that uses that file for Reporting. At that point, the desired file is present on the server, and WF Client and Server can go to town on it. You can have WF discard the file when the work is done.

First I have no idea what jsp is. LOL. Second, if I understand you, the user must navigate to the file. We are looking to avoid that scenario. Our IT team said the users can always get to the files OUTSIDE of WF. But whats the point of a portal then!

Do I have this correct Also with Sharepoint, I think I have the VBA to write our files there EXCEPT there seems to be a size limitation, not sure if that limitation is set by microsoft or our ITso far our IT has not responded to me.

[John Gelona]

We dont store stuff on local drives, we put files like excel and pdf that users load from our dashboord/protal in baseapp on the client server. For example, we have a daily report that runs nightly in Report Caster. Instead of emailing the report, it is copied to baseapp on the client server. There is a link on the dashboard/portal where the user can open the report. That is probably 50% of the stuff on our dashboard/portal. The rest is reports users can run on-demand. My general rule is any report that takes longer than about 5-10 seconds to run (that does not include the time is takes for the report to display back to the user), is pre-run and copied to the client server. Of course there are a few exceptions but 90% of our stuff on the dashboard/portal has less than a 10 second respose time, and that includes our custom built user tracking data.

[robert fuschetto]

Our Excel pivots are created outside WF. We did try to move them to baseapp manuallywe got an error that .xlsb files were not compatible. Further, I am not sure how our non IBI process using VBA to open, Refresh and Save these Excel files would be able to write to baseapp.

[Toby Mills]

If you are on windows you can create virtual directory or FTP site and map your network drive . They will give you option to view it as directory and create a link . I am not sure if we map the network drive as app folder in WF server and access the same way as IIS using url (/approot/appfolder/file_name )

 

Did you get a chance to try making a virtual directory in IIS and turning on Directory browsing as Satheesh suggested

I havent used this feature of IIS in forever but heres how it probably goes:

For example - if I make a folder called RobertsDocs and then make a virtual directory pointing to this like so in IIS

 

image.png649559 77.1 KB

 

Then I go to click on RobertsDocs and look for Directory Browsing

 

image.png1064339 141 KB

 

In here - the default is that Directory Browsing is Disabled but we can click on Enable to enable it (look at the right hand pane of IIS).

 

Let me a copy a couple of spreadsheets over to this folder

 

image.png797195 9.95 KB

 

Now if I browse to that virtual directory we set up in IIS:

 

image.png924387 24.8 KB

 

Thats not pretty, but from there I could click on a .xlsx and get it pulled down to my machine.

Now you just need to figure out how to get this onto your BIP. I thought itd be straightforward to just choose a URL to insert into a panel - looks like itd take a little more effort than that (like making an HTML file that resides in the repository and have it redirect to /RobertsDocs on open).

Is this sort of approach even possible for you guys Too ugly perhaps

[robert fuschetto]

To Microsoft I sayTHIS IS NUTS.

The user does not want to have to type:

Q:foler1folder2folder3.Report1.docx and

Z:folderAfolderb.Report123.xlsb

Z:folderAfolderbReportC.xlsx

etc

So we want a portal to ease the pain. That portal was WF.

I wish IBI had some suggestions.

I can pass this along to our IS team. I am still a little confused as to what the end result user experience would be

What would the press A button in WF What would they see This:

[John Edwards 2]

john.gelona:

 

For example, we have a daily report that runs nightly in Report Caster. Instead of emailing the report, it is copied to baseapp on the client server. There is a link on the dashboard/portal where the user can open the report.

 

 

This is outbound, and its easy. WebFOCUS has about half a dozen ways to deliver including libraries and folders, email, etc.

Inbound is another story.

Robert, you do NOT want any web page to be able to just root around on your drive for stuff. Wed all be robbed blind by the weekend. This isnt a WF thing its a global security thing. IBI/Tibco need to live within the restrictions that all web browser publishers put in place for our safety. But that doesnt mean that it stops you from doing what you want. It just means that you or your end-users need to take an explicit action to make it happen. The presumption is that you and your end-users know what is safe and what isnt.

Options I can think of

1. Shared drive. Mentioned already. End-Users drop a file on the shared drive that the WF server can access. These files can be hoovered up on a schedule by I-Way, Data Migrator or even Report Caster. (Using Report Caster is cheating, so you didnt hear that from me.) You can set them up to check every minute if you like. On my local customers setup we have jobs that monitor a particular folder on a shared drive for files to show up. When they do, the WF server makes an archive copy with a date in another directory, then renames the just-arrived file to a standard name that matches a master files dataset location name. Kick off a report on that master file, do what you gotta do, delete the file when youre done. End-user action is to copy the file to that shared folder, the rest happens automatically a minute later.

2. Use the Upload function via the client portal, or via the server console. This uploads a file to a folder on the WF server, and the rest can proceed as in option 1 above.

3. Create an Upload web page that allows the user to select a file and send it to the server. This is the one I mentioned earlier in the thread. Find a kid that knows jsp, pay him $15 an hour to write this for you. Likely cost you $45 total. The advantage to this one is that it can execute the output run immediately on-demand. Send the file, get the result right back, even in the browser window that the user is already in. Theres no break in the thread of execution, something I needed at my prior customers site.

4. This is too cool for words, but we do it at my current customer email the file directly to WebFOCUS. This is so secret, so special, that I only give out how to do it to people that reply with the secret phrase what this boardgame needs is a good set of clay poker chips. Set up an email address specifically for this process. End-users (or the original source of the data) send the file as an email attachment directly to the WF server. The server gobbles up the attachment, processes the data in the next minute or two via iWay, Data Migrator or Report Caster (again, cheating) and reports can be run against the output in all the usual WebFOCUS ways a few minutes later. We had a need to do this where I am because of a monolithic source of data that we can only get extracts from via a pre-fabbed set of reports. The first time it worked I felt like the king of all Londinium. The beauty of it is that it just runs, updating our summary tables on a daily basis every evening. I use Data Migrator to make the transition from attached Excel and CSV files to data in SQL*Server tables. But thats not the only way to do it. I dont know your toolset, but want to give you all the options I can think of.

[robert fuschetto]

REH Satheeshs suggestion, this was the comment from out IT:

Good morning. Ive been reading up on and poking around this idea. It still appears to use the mapping/server addressing as what we are using so far. Having : mapping to [<virtual directory>](file://%3cserver%20name%3e/%3cvirtual%20directory%3e) will still follow the same schema as the current X drive and will run in to the same local file reference issue. Other suggestions from the forum are most welcome since I want to explore as many potential solutions as practical.

[robert fuschetto]

John, First THANK YOU. I should make a few things clearer.

Each weekend we use MSAccess as the engine to various things. Initially it fires off various SQL Stored procs to refresh dictionaries and populate our EDW. It then uses vba to open a half dozen or or Excel files, some .xlsx, some .xlsb and some very large PowerPivots, refreshes them and saves them to a secured mapped share drive. Some of these files are in excess of 300,000KB. Yes they take a while to refresh but it is after hours and they deliver a huge bang for the buck alleviating the need for a great deal of reporting.

These pivots along with a number of other Epic cubes (more pivots) in combination with SAP Webi reports, some Tableau reports, some data residing on SharePoint, Training documentation in Word, Training mp4 files recorded in WebEx and wealth of dashboarding / FML reporting etc provided by WF are brought together under our WF portal; a one stop shop if you will. Everything works except the files stored on the share drives.

Some Comments,

 

Are we the ONLY business to do this It seems hard to believe Are you saying we have been unsecure all this time while we were on IE I am not technical, I really do not know.

 

RE:

1. Shared drive. Mentioned already. End-Users drop a file on the shared drive that the WF server can access. These files can be hoovered up on a schedule by I-Way, Data Migrator or even Report Caster. (Using Report Caster is cheating, so you didnt hear that from me.) You can set them up to check every minute if you like. On my local customers setup we have jobs that monitor a particular folder on a shared drive for files to show up. When they do, the WF server makes an archive copy with a date in another directory, then renames the just-arrived file to a standard name that matches a master files dataset location name. Kick off a report on that master file, do what you gotta do, delete the file when youre done. End-user action is to copy the file to that shared folder, the rest happens automatically a minute later.

This sounds promising but I really do not follow. So I would allow my previously described MSAccess routine that leaves refreshed reporting on a file share interface with all this What does report caster do Moving the files where How does the user access them If you can elaborate on this process a bit more that would be great.

RE;

Use the Upload function via the client portal, or via the server console.** This uploads a file to a folder on the WF server, and the rest can proceed as in option 1 above.

I dont know what the upload function is but it sounds manual. Further, I can also tell you that if this involves moving the reports to baseapp or something, we tried thatI tried pasting one of our .xlsb files to baseappgot an error saying .xlsb files are not allowed. Again, perhaps this UPLOAD function you describe would worknot really sure what it is or how it can be automated so we need not pay someone to sit and upload files every morning. If you think there is potential for us here tho, please elaborate.

RE:

Create an Upload web page

Again, sounds very manual. no Will this work for files that are 300,000KB How long does it take etc

I am not sure #4 applies for moving Excel docs around.

John,

you put a lot of time into this. I promise it is NOT wasted. I am in a precarious situation with our IS team. They do not really know the product and I do not really know the administration nor am I secured to perform anything administrative anyway.

I am going to wait for some comments from yourself and then forward your suggestions to our IS team.

To be honest this is show stopper for us at this point. I get that its not an IBI issue but I bet the first company that devises a teachable solution to all this which allows for such links will be sitting pretty.

We are a subsidiary and use WF. Our IS does not use WF. They have a home grown portal. To me it is half a portal as I must MANUALLY copy a few files into it once a month. It feels like at the very least, IBI should have a way, even if manual, even if we must assign the function to a person in our group, to do as you say and upload these files into WF each week or dayI am just not sure how to do so and if our LARGE file (or .xlsb files) can loaded. Thanks again, this is VERY much appreciated.

[Martin Yergeau]

Hi Robert,

IIS solution does work as explained above.

I was strungling with similar issue as you have since months and now I solved it in a minute.

I was already using IIS and the below code, but I was not using a virtual directory in IIS because prior to Edge (modern browsers) I was able to read directly my files on the network.

Using that solution, I can have hyperlink to my Portal & HTML pages that opens (in my case) pdf files.

This code is used as an External Request in each of my HTML pages

-* ----------------------------------------

-* File: IBFS:/WFC/Repository/Public/OpenPDF_Doc.fex

-* ----------------------------------------

-* This fex is used to open the network saved PDF ducumentation file

-* It is used in the HTML page from an Hyperlink and an hidden parameters that pass the document's name

-* ----------------------------------------

-SET &WF_ENV = LOWER(TRIM_(BOTH, ' ', FGETENV(30,'COMPUTERNAME', 30,'A30')));

-*-* To access pdf documentation, there is an IIS virtual directory (InfoDoc) that point to E:InfoDoc

-SET FILE_PATH = 'http://' || &WF_ENV || '/InfoDoc/';

-SET &FILE_NAME = &DOC_NAME || '_&LANG.EVAL.pdf';

 

-HTMLFORM BEGIN

<html>

<head>

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=!IBI.AMP.#FILE_PATH;!IBI.AMP.FILE_NAME;">

</head>

</html>

-HTMLFORM END

Then in the HTML pages, I have an hyperlink control that runs the above External Request from the Click event in Task which have predefined/assigned and hidden variable &DOC_NAME with the document name that I want to open. Something such as

-SET &DOC_NAME = 'Inventory';

In my situation, I have all document existing in French & English, reason why in the above fex I use the below to point to the proper file according to the language

-SET &FILE_NAME = &DOC_NAME || '_&LANG.EVAL.pdf';

I also have the bellow to add an hyperlink in portal banner which call the same first fex

-* ----------------------------------------

-* File: IBFS://WFC/Repository/Public/InfoHowTo.fex

-* ----------------------------------------

-* This is used to display the How To hyperlink

-* --------------------------------------------------

-* PRODUCE THE HYPERLINK

-* --------------------------------------------------

DEFINE FILE CAR

HOW_TO /A30V = IF '&LANG.EVAL' EQ 'EN' THEN 'How To' ELSE 'Comment faire';

END

TABLE FILE CAR

SUM

HOW_TO AS ''

BY COUNTRY NOPRINT

WHERE READLIMIT EQ 1;

ON TABLE SET PAGE-NUM NOLEAD

ON TABLE NOTOTAL

ON TABLE HOLD AS H001 FORMAT HTMTABLE

ON TABLE SET HTMLEMBEDIMG ON

ON TABLE SET HTMLCSS ON

ON TABLE SET STYLE *

INCLUDE = IBFS:/EDA/EDASERVE/_EDAHOME/ETC/endeflt.sty,

$

UNITS=IN,

$

TYPE=DATA,

COLUMN=HOW_TO,

SIZE=10,

COLOR=RGB(8 97 74),

STYLE=NORMAL,

$

TYPE=DATA,

COLUMN=HOW_TO,

FOCEXEC=IBFS:/WFC/Repository/Public/OpenPDF_Doc.fex( DOC_NAME='How_To'),

TARGET='_blank',

$

ENDSTYLE

END

-RUN

 

-HTMLFORM BEGIN

<html>

<head>

<style type="text/css">

body

{

margin: 0px;

//font-family: "Arial", sans-serif;

//font-size: 9pt; color: red;

}

</style>

</head>

<body>

!IBI.FIL.H001;

</body>

</html>

-HTMLFORM END

-* ----------------------------------------

-* END : InfoHowTo.fex

-* ----------------------------------------

 

Hoping that can help you

[John Edwards 2]

So if all of your material is being output to a drive on your network, why cant WF access it Are you simply looking for WF to provide an output page with links to download the output If thats the case you should be able to make the desired folders available to Apache or IIS and let users download away from a Non-WF-generated web page. It wont provide a link like J:abcdefg.xlsx in the page, instead something like http://wfserver/abcd/efg.xlsx.

I thought your problem was getting data from a user to the server, not the other way around. It appears thats incorrect (your second description cleared it up for me, thanks.)

[robert fuschetto]

A potential if not stop gap solution was proposed by our IT team - so far it seems to work. Their proposal was to essentially mimic the part of our WF portal page that contained the links to these Excel files using a new Word Doc with hyperlinks to them. Then save the Word doc to SharePoint. On the WF portal we remove all original links and add a NEW link to this new Word Doc.

This seems to work so far. It sidesteps the SharePoint size limitation we encountered with some of our Excel files and allows them to remain on the share where they have always resided.

The user experience is not as clean, but it beats them manually browsing their way towards the files. Its a stop gap until something better comes along.

I can see potential for us using a combination of the WF portal directly linked to SharePoint after we perhaps consolidating various Word Training Docs and Informative docs to Sharepoint but using the new method for access to our Large Excel files.

Hope this makes sense, I am already considering trying this with a Power Point Slide instead of a Word Doc to make the interface look better. Anyway, its a potential quick easy, albeit kludgy hopefully temporary fix.

[robert fuschetto]

Followup:

Our SharePoint idea worked fine on an old install of SharePoint. It does not work on the new site set up for us under SharePoint 365. There is no real SharePoint support so I am not sure if its a SP setting or simply and impossibility.

I am not going to pretend I understand the IIS and HTML page stuff. Under IIS, the look and feel shown above probably would not fly hererather uglyunless I misunderstand.

Sorry, but I feel if IBI is offering a portal, they should offer some sort of solution.

We have been told we need a reporting serverand another portal solutionnot sure what that is all about.

Other software allows the reporting to be uploaded into it and referenced. IBI DOES NOT. We tried porting various content to baseaap. It will not accept xlsb files for example. I think we tried word and PDFs as well one of them was unacceptable as I recall. I suspect we will be pushed to different software.

The portal is 50% the reason we use WF/IBI. it seems we may need to move away from the WF portalthat leaves WF in general vulnerable. It seems hard to believe we are alone in all this. Perhaps everyone is still using IEbut those days are numbered.

If anyone has any specific technical direction on how we may circumvent this while preserving the user experience, please let me know. We will be again contacting IBI. I will again follow-up after that.

Apologies but I am not quite on the techie level of a lot of you folks nor do we have inhouse support. We rely on IBIthat has not worked thus far. If you want to offer a portal, there should be a way to make this work in WF; either thru the software or via some recommended mean using other tools.

[robert fuschetto]

We tried linking to a file in baseapp. It works for the IBI analystsbut we have security implemented such that only ADMINS may access baseapp. Our IS team is not budging on this one. They claim this set up is pretty standard