CMS/Reports: CMS Object Catalog Report

Reporting off of the CMS can be a laborious thing - heck - if it wasn't, we never would have developed CMS/Connect in the first place.

But, since we have developed it, now its time for us to flex our wits and see what type of compelling and information-rich reports we can develop against the CMS/Connect Universe.  Some of the many who have already begun using CMS/Connect Community Edition are well on their way, of course, developing reports and performing analysis against their installations, while others may be a bit more report-writing averse.  No worries - that's why we're developing the CMS/Reports stack for plug-and-play analysis right into your own deployment.

For this reason, Infolytik will be delivering a handful of high-value "kitchen sink" style reports , always bundled in the current release of CMS/Connect Community Edition - that will cover with great breadth and depth the inner workings of your CMS.  We'll break reporting down into a few fundamental report categories, including:

• Security, Rights and Permissions
• Objects and Folders
• System and Server Details
• Multi-CMS Analysis
• Migration and LCM Analysis

In this first installment, we take a closer look at Objects and Folders. 

One of the many challenges with hierarchical-style reporting is to retrieve the parent-child relationships of items within the CMS.  Because CMS/Connect is a real-time driver, it relies on fairly complex algorithms to compute this information in order for it present tree representations of data via the Universe.  The report we deliver today is the CMS Object Catalog report.

CMS Object Catalog provides a few fundamental features:

• Truly hierarchical, sectioned reports of the entire CMS
• Security-cognizant inventory

Hierarchical Sections

 Let's take a look at a few depictions of how objects are first cataloged in the CMC - the default object browsing and manipulation took in Business Objects Enterprise:

The first graphic shows a standard CMC view of available objects and folders.  Limitations in using this view are:

1. inability to see - simultaneously - folders and objects belonging to each
2. limited content types (we cannot see Universes in this view, for instance)
3. the display requires frequent pagination and, simply put, is not conducive to quality analysis

With the CMS Object Catalog report, we've managed to merge and combine object types in the CMS across the complete folder trees to which they belong, in a completely searchable and navigable report tree.

Security-based Viewing Contexts

If we connect to the CMS using a different set of credentials, CMS/Connect will simply inherit that users' security context and return only the data they're allowed to see or access.  This has major benefits in deployments where the CMS/Connect is promoted to the server (server edition) and utilizes @DBUSER or @BOUSER in its connection definition.  By doing this, larger enterprise deployments or shared service style deployments can provide CMS/CMC self-service applications that only query and report metadata relevant to the initiating user (video to be added).

There are numerous other advantages of being able to hierarchically query the CMS - especially when it comes to reporting against security and permissions matrices - where using a report like the CMS catalog one, makes sense.  In the next installment, we will use the CMS Object Catalog report as a baseline to develop security and rights self-service style reports and push them out to Infoview.

So download CMS/Connect Community Edition where you'll find this report bundled and know what's in your CMS - today!

Happy reporting!