Custom Parameters

Larry Beasley shared this question 5 years ago
Answered

How do I use them? We recently had an outage and because of this links to URL were hosed. Those affected had to change all their reports to reflect the links. The challenge is, YellowfinBI is not installed in the same sub-domain as the rest of the application. Therefore relative(local) links are not possible.


For example, given a "Link to URL" column, previously the link would have been:

https://reports.msn.com/report_num=##


We had some issues with the reports sub-domain, so we moved reports to reports2. This breaks the link so in order to fix this the field needs to be changed to :

https://reports2.msn.com/report_num=##


When the reports server issue is resolved and things are moved back to that sub-domain, the report is broken again.


I'm thinking that Custom Parameters can fix this but the Wiki lacks use-case examples:


57af4d715aa625d0fac19492ef73e628


Please provide an example here and update the Wiki.


Best regards

Replies (8)

photo
1

Hi Larry,

Thanks for reaching out. I agree we should have more public-facing documentation regarding this, and I will request for this to happen, but in the mean time I do have an example from internal documentation:

Custom Parameter is used in report builder via Link to URL option.


Use: We can store a URL or a part of URL as a parameter in Yellowfin and use that parameter in the report instead of adding the URL in every report


1.Go to Admin Console --> Configuration --> System tab --> Custom Parameters


Give variable name : eg : TESTPARAM

Give the link: eg: www.google.com.au/


2.Click on '+'

3. Save it.


4. Create a report. Drag and drop dimensions and metrics. Go to Format option of any of the columns

5. Change Format to "Link to URL"

4. Give the URL:

https://${TESTPARAM}

Parameter should be given as: ${parameter}

5. Click on the 'X' to save it5. Now Booking Method is displayed as hyperlink.

6. When we hover over it, we can see the URL is shown at left bottom

7. If we click o the data, it navigates to the URL

ffe7d706b9c4cd198dcd626eca0a5899


ed52224518517b707b40b51ce00d98976f5aaa79be06c0e160f8772a01192872Hopefully this helps!

Please let me know if you have any other questions on this as you're going through it.

Regards, Mike

photo
2

Mike, this is terrific! You can just ask someone to copy and paste your excellent tutorial, IMO. I spoke with someone that tried this and it mostly worked out for them. They believe that they have a syntax error but stated that trying to also pass the column value by adding ## did not work. Perhaps that's a caveat to using custom parameters, you cannot also pass in the column value. If that's the case then this won't work for my partners. Still a great tutorial!

photo
1

Hi Larry,

Thanks for your response. I've reached out to the appropriate party about adding this to our Wiki.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or if we're okay to close this case out for now then.

Regards, Mike

photo
2

Mike,


This does resolve the issue but I wanted to confirm if ## works along with custom parameters or not.

photo
3

Hi Larry,

Sorry about that. I can confirm this does not work in the Custom Parameters section. I've gone ahead and created an Idea post and submitted an enhancement request for this. You can reference the Idea post here.

Any potential updates regarding this will be posted there. As such, I'll go ahead and Resolve this Question item.

Regards,

Mike

photo
1

Forgive me while I dredge this back up. :)

I have the following situation occurring.

After this failed experiment, I changed to the following:

In both cases, the resulting URL sent to the browser = https://%24%7Bclienturl%7D/client/my_cw_clients.asp?client_id=2016644 with the url encoding showing. What am I missing?

photo
1

Hi Jason,

Thanks for reaching out. What version and build of Yellowfin are you on?

Regards,

Mike

photo
1

I am using BI within the Credible framework. I am not certain how to tell which version/build I am on. Any tips on how to find that information?

photo
1

Hi Jason,

There are two main ways: under Application Details in your info.jsp file, which can be accessed by appending '/info.jsp' to your login URL. For example, localhost:8080/info.jsp. The other way would be under Administration > System Information.

Regards,

Mike

photo
1

I unfortunately do not have access to either of those options, from what I can see. If I attempt to append the /info.jsp to the end of the address, it simply refreshes the page and ignores the added filepath. Under Administration, there is no System Information option.

photo
1

Hi Jason,

It's pretty common for custom environments to have the /info.jsp option removed. You can also find your version and build in the jdbc.log file. This would be located in the <YellowfinInstall>/appserver/logs folder. You can just ctrl+f either "Version" or "Build". Just make sure it's the latest entry in the jdbc log to ensure it's not the info from an earlier restart as that info is generated every YF restart in the jdbc.log.

Regards,

Mike

photo
1

All of that information is locked behind our EHR system and I am unable to see it. I looked into the documentation and it really seems as though we are either on 7.1 or 7.2 as of right now.

photo
1

Hi Jason,

Unfortunately, this is unexpected behavior that I can confirm works in latest build of version 8 (and 7.4). As a quick example:

/a66bd3f70e7e471f9695be0cbc135ec3

Correctly returns the following:

/a073b0dce1fcd87ac59a64cc8b9b5763

This means that knowing what version/build you're on is important for replication purposes, so we can identify the error and confirm next steps, which if the issue does lie in either 7.1 or 7.2, the only option would be to upgrade as those versions have reached end of life quite some time ago. I'm also wondering whether this could be related to the Credible integration itself, or possibly even the config db being used, or some combination of each, but I'm going to assume determining that info would be difficult as well.

If someone at Credible or an administrator can obtain and confirm version/build and the config db being used (all found in the /info.jsp page) that'd be great. Failing that, our hands are kind of tied at this point - or if upgrading winds up being the only possible solution, which I'm going to assume will not be possible currently. If this does wind up being the case, you may be able to accomplish similar behavior via Calculated Fields by building the whole url as a simple calculated field as a fallback method:

'https://domain.com/alarm/1/' + Column1
Please let me know how you'd like to proceed and/or how goes.

Regards,

Mike

photo
1

We are getting ready to upgrade to the newest version, so I will place this on hold until then. I appreciate your help, and you can go ahead and mark this as answered since it seems to be an issue on our end.

Happy New Year!

photo
1

Hi Jason,

Sounds good. Please reach back out if the issue persists then. Happy New Year!

Regards,

Mike

photo
Leave a Comment
 
Attach a file