Managing Hyperlinks in Web Intelligence

In Web Intelligence, you can create hyperlinks using either a dialog box or the OpenDocument command language.

To give immediate access to information related to a report from that report, you can define cells as hyperlinks.

The user can select the hyperlink, and open a web page with additional related information.

When you select a cell that contains a hyperlink, the target document specified in the link opens. The target document can be another Web Intelligence document, a website, a PDF, Excel or Word document, or any resource accessible through a hyperlink.

Hyperlinks can be either static or dynamic. A static hyperlink always links to the same document in the same way. A dynamic hyperlink can link differently depending on the data in the document containing the hyperlink.

You can create the following different types of hyperlink:

• A cell where the cell text is the hyperlink text.
• A cell with an associated hyperlink.
• A link to another document in the CMS (Central Management Server). For target documents that refer to BEx queries, UNX or UNV universes that contain prompts that use Index Awareness, there are additional parameters to set.

When you create a link, the link is defined using the OpenDocument syntax. You can also build links manually using OpenDocument. For more information on OpenDocument syntax, see the Viewing Documents using OpenDocument guide.

As well as linking between documents, you can also link report elements in the same report by defining elements as input controls that filter the values in other report elements.

When you define a cell as a hyperlink, the cell text becomes an active hyperlink.

For example, if you define a free-standing cell containing the text http://www.sap.com as a hyperlink, selecting the cell takes you to the SAP web page.

This method is best suited for static hyperlinks, where the text in the cell always remains the same and links to the same resource in the same way.

When you associate a hyperlink with a cell, you define a hyperlink that links to the source document when the cell is selected.

The cell text itself is not the hyperlink.

This is the recommended method for creating dynamic hyperlinks, for the following reasons:

• It is specially tailored for working with the parameters in dynamic hyperlinks.
• It shields you from the complexity of hyperlink syntax. You define your hyperlink using a graphical interface, and the hyperlink syntax is generated and managed behind the scenes.
• It allows you to define hyperlink text that is different from the cell text.

OpenDocument is a web application that processes incoming URL requests for documents and any other viewable object type in the Central Management Server (CMS), and delivers the correct document to the end user in the appropriate viewer.

You can either open OpenDocument links or create them following a specific syntax, depending on the client to which you want the OpenDocument link to point, the report you want to open, and so on.

This allows you to send users direct links to a document and avoid having them navigate through a folder hierarchy, such as in the BI Launch Pad.

The OpenDocument syntax and its parameters allow you to construct URLs that link to these documents. For example, consider the following URL:

http://<servername>:<port>/BOE/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?iDocID=Aa6GrrM79cRAmaOSMGoadKI&sIDType=CUID

This URL accesses the object in the CMS with the CUID value of Aa6GrrM79cRAmaOSMGoadKI. If this is a Crystal Report, for example, then the report is rendered to the user in a default SAP Crystal Reports viewer. In this example, iDocID is one of many URL parameters. These parameters specify how to access a particular document in the CMS, or determine how to display the document to the user.

You can link to many viewable object types with the OpenDocument syntax. Some examples include:

• Crystal Reports
• Web Intelligence documents
• BI Launch Pad workspaces

For more information on the syntax of an OpenDocument link and the parameters you should include when creating one, see the Viewing Documents Using OpenDocument Guide at https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_BUSINESSOBJECTS_BUSINESS_INTELLIGENCE_PLATFORM/954ffd91a37d45c093d80dd6db2665e4/45f816276e041014910aba7db0e91070.html?version=4.3.