Clarity

Hi All

We are beginning our upgrade project from 12.1.3 to 14.2.  As we are currently still using Actuate for our custom reporting we have a decision to make between using Jaspersoft or Business Objects.

We only have a small number of custom reports at the moment, having converted the majority to portlets recently.  I don't think running both is likely to be an option for us.

Has anyone done any comparison between the two? Or do you have any views on why one might be a better choice than the other? On the face of it, Jaspersoft seems to offer more long term, both functionally and in terms of being a supported choice for CA, but I'd like to be able to back my opinion up.

Any views greatly appreciated, thanks.

Owen

Hi Owen,

As you certainly know, Business Objects support in Clarity is planned to be eventually dropped, so from that point of view if you were now to choose between both, I would recommend going on Jaspersoft. The reason for this being that if you were to build your environments and custom reports (if you are using them) and then you had to move, that would be requiring time and efforts to perform.
As a brief summary of comparison : Jaspersoft is smaller and generally smarter: it requires less resources than Business Objects; but it also provides less functionalities. What would be best for you will depend on what features you are going to be using.
If you have the bandwidth, you can also install both and see which one would be more convenient for your business. If not anything else, it can definitely help you with your decision, based on your exact situation.

Kind Regards

Nika Hadzhikidi
CA Technologies
Principal Support Engineer

Hi Nika

That's useful, and pretty much sums up what we were already thinking in terms of JS being a lighter solution, and of course the future proofing that it gives us in terms of supported technology.

One thing I haven't been able to figure out though: what will happen in terms of upgrade given that we don't currently have BO?  Will the upgrade fail without it being there? Has an upgrade been done on an Actuate only 12 system that you are aware of?

Thanks

Owen

Hi Owen,

The upgrade should not fail, even if you have no Report server configured. It may fail though if you still have Actuate in, I have had issues like that before. Please ensure you remove your Actuate server from the properties.xml. Your Report line should look similarly to this:

  <reportServer vendor="bo" webUrl="http://localhost:8900" serviceUrl="http://localhost:8000" volumeName="" username="administrator" password=""/>

This is the default parameter, which will allow a successful upgrade.

Please let me know for any questions.

Kind Regards

Nika Hadzhikidi
CA Technologies
Principal Support Engineer

Hi Nika,

I thought of create another discussion thread, however my question will be more relevant to the answer you provided and i thought this correct context to continue this thread for my question. Please see my question here

As per the Demo(14.3) provide by CA Yesterday to us - I did not quite convinced with one point in terms of reporting.

When it comes to BO - Crystal Reports - Whenever you run the reports in Clarity - we will get the Real time data(meaning whatever data exist in Clarity Database at that particular moment).

When it comes to Jasper Soft - When we run the run the reports in Clarity - whatever data we are getting on the reports is not picking up from Clarity Database right? rather it's picking up from Jasper Soft Data ware house (the data which might have updated some time back (or) as per the Dataware house job scheduled).

Considering the above scenario - do we have any work around or alternative using which we can run the reports to pull real-time data on reports in 14.3?

Please consider that we are using only Jasper Soft for our Clarity reporting purpose, we are not using any other tool for Clarity reporting.

Please provide your valuable feedback.

Best Regards

Jagadeesh

Hi Jagadeesh,

Yes you are correct, BO Reports will actually query real time Clarity data. There is also an inconvenience in this, because this means that if you run heavy reporting, you should actually do it off peak hours only, since otherwise you will hit your Clarity database performance.
That's why using a separate DWH database can also be a big plus, as you get your data without slowing down your system.
When it comes to Jaspersoft : most reports use DWH database, which means they will retrieve the data that is in DWH, updated by the Load DWH job. You can run the job as often as you need to have the data updated: most of the reports return data that may be updated Daily with no impact on being real-time. I have seen customers running the DWH job as Incremental as often as every hour.

If you need to get an actual real-time data from Clarity, with Jaspersoft, I would recommend you use real time Ad Hoc Views and Reports that provide that feature.

Hope this helps, please let me know for any questions.

Kind Regards

Nika Hadzhikidi
CA Technologies
Principal Support

Hi Nika, Thanks for your prompt response.

I agree to the point of performance impact but at the same time it would be more confusing when it comes to a case such as - user/s updated some Financial values and run the report in next 30-minutes time to see how does values being populated on report and he won't see the latest values on report(because the DWH job has scheduled after every hour) but however he can able to see the latest values on Clarity Application. This may lead confusions to end users.

coming to the point mentioned in your reply:

If you need to get an actual real-time data from Clarity, with Jasper Soft, I would recommend you use real time Ad Hoc Views and Reports that provide that feature.

What does again reports means here - if i understand it correctly in 14.3 there is only one link exist to access Reporting i.e. Advanced reporting and once you clicked on that will be connected to DWH rather Clarity DB irrespective of what you would be creating on Advanced reporting link.

To be precise - All the Adhoc Views, Reports , Dashboards data will be populating from DWH not from Clarity DB, then how can we get real time data using Adhoc Views / Reports?

Please clarity.

Hi Nika, could you provide more clarify about my question?

coming to the point mentioned in your reply:

If you need to get an actual real-time data from Clarity, with Jasper Soft, I would recommend you use real time Ad Hoc Views and Reports that provide that feature.

What does again reports means here - if i understand it correctly in 14.3 there is only one link exist to access Reporting i.e. Advanced Reporting and once you clicked on that will be connected to DWH rather Clarity DB irrespective of what you would be creating on Advanced reporting link.

To be precise - All the Adhoc Views, Reports , Dashboards data will be populating from DWH not from Clarity DB, then how can we get real time data using Adhoc Views / Reports?

Best Regards

Jagadeesh

Hi Jagadeesh,

When you access Advanced Reporting via the link you can create your own reports and views, which can be based on a specific domain/datasource.

In Jaspersoft, there are two OOTB datasources included with JS content:

The Advanced Reporting content includes two data sources as follows:
• CA PPM BEAN – CA PPM Bean Data Source
The CA PPM BEAN data source is a bean data source type required by the Advanced Reporting content to access the CA PPM transactional schema.
• CA PPM DWH BEAN – CA PPM Data Warehouse Bean Data Source
The CA PPM DWH BEAN data source is a bean data source type required by the Advanced Reporting content to access the Data Warehouse schema.
Almost all reports and input controls are using the CA PPM DWH BEAN data source. Some reports display data that is not available in the Data Warehouse and for this reason they are using the CA PPM BEAN data source. Each report has a 'Report Properties' section that indicates which data source is referenced by the report.

Based on those datasources, there are 8 existing OOTB Domains in Jaspersoft:

You can also create custom Domains with different SQL structures based on CA PPM or CA DWH or any other datasource, and then run Reports and Ad-Hocs Views based on them. In fact any user would be able to go in and create their own ad hoc view.

Please let me know in this answers your question.

Kind Regards

Nika Hadzhikidi
CA Technologies
Principal Support Engineer

Thanks once again Nika for providing such a detailed explanation.That makes much more sense.

Assuming CA PPM BEAN Data Source means - it's Clarity Database(meaning accessing this data source means we are directly retrieving the data from Directly Clarity DB)

One last question - as per your explanation - I understand that there is way to create Reports which will show Real Time Data (i.e.same like as Crystal Reports in other terms we can retrieve the Data from Clarity Database rather from JS DWH).

But in order to achieve this we need to select CA PPM BEAN as Data Source while creating the Adhoc Report / View.

Is my above understanding correct?

Also can you please clarify these 2-statements.

Using Jasper Soft we will get the capability to run the reports in 2-different ways

1.Reports which are not strict to show Real Time Data - we can run these from CA PPM DWH BEAN Data Source - this way we can reduce the load on our PROD Clarity system.

2.Reports which are strict to show Real Time Data        - we can run these from CA PPM BEAN Data Source.

Best Regards

Jagadeesh

Hi Jagadeesh

Yes the CA PPM BEAN datasource is the connection to the Clarity PPM. You will use the Datasource to create a Domain and then base the reports and views on them.

For your alternatives, you can either run stock/custom reports on DWH and update the DWH data accordingly, or if you need real-time, then you can go with a domain using CA PPM BEAN datasource.

Kind Regards

Nika Hadzhikidi
CA Technologies
Principal Support Engineer

Nice to hear that Nika. Thanks a lot for all the information provided. Much appreciated your time & efforts.

Best Regards

Jagadeesh