Overview of In-Document Analytics (8206)

Content that uses In-Document Analytics provides users with an interactive interface that allows the generation of real-time, dynamic reports, charts, and dashboards.  Its versatility allows you to package a data set with a combination of analytical views, resulting in highly intuitive and interactive self-service business intelligence. This gives you an edge in presentation and analysis, making it easy to develop and share concepts, ideas, and scenarios. An interactive report is a self-contained report, meaning that it contains all the data and JavaScript® within the HTML output file. Packaging the data and the interactive functions in the HTML file also makes the output highly compressible for email and transparent to security systems.

Your users can explore and interact with your data using various analytical tools such as sorting, filtering, calculations, roll-ups, and pivoting. They can also experiment with different scenarios using various options.

All of the interactive content that you create  functions independently of a server, and is portable, making it easy for your users to work with and analyze complex data without requiring the use of an external application, such as Microsoft Excel. With two types of users (developer and end user), the roles in development and delivery of materials are clear. The end user interacts with the content that the developer creates and deploys. They can obtain content without any additional plug-ins or programs should they choose to access your content remotely or offline, independent of a server.

In InfoAssist, there are two output formats that you can use to enable In-Document Analytics functionality: HTML Analytical Document format (formerly known as AHTML) and PDF Analytical Document format (formerly known as APDF). Using Analytical Document format (ADF) you can generate dynamic content and distribute it offline, even when you are disconnected from a browser.

Note: These formats are enabled in the Administration Console by your administrator. As a developer, once you have access to these output formats, you can begin generating content that you can distribute across your enterprise. The HTML Analytic Document format, as it appears in InfoAssist, is shown in the following image.

There are also two available styles that you can apply from the Procedure Settings dialog box. If you created interactive content in an earlier release, you can continue to use this style, which is known as Legacy. Legacy provides options like the Chart/Rollup and Pivot tools. An example of legacy style in a report is shown in the following image.

Alternatively, you can use the Designer Style, which currently presents some of the same options, but displays more like a page that  you create in WebFOCUS Designer. An example of Designer style in a chart, is shown in the following image.

When you run your content, you can review and continue to develop it using the available menus.  For example, when you run a chart, you can select the chart menu to change the type of chart you are showing, as shown in the following image. 

 To add a new chart or edit your content, you can use the options available from the vertical Ellipsis menu, which is shown in the following image.

When you view your report or chart at full screen, a hamburger menu also displays, as shown in the following image. From this menu, you can exit full screen or restore the dashboard.

You can also password protect your interactive content  to restrict users from viewing it unless they enter a password. Data is encrypted using the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) specification, and the password is used as the key for decrypting and encrypting the data.Therefore, the password is not stored in the interactive content, and you do not need a connection to go back to the server for password verification.

The HTML page, enabled with In-Document Analytic capabilities, contains both the JavaScript and the data for the content so you can interact with the data in
a disconnected mode. Internet Explorer detects the JavaScript and issues a warning. If you look at the Internet Explorer warning, it mentions explicitly the detection of interactive content, which is the JavaScript. The same warning appears when pop-ups are blocked in the browser.

Because all post-retrieval processing is performed in the memory of the web browser, interactive content that has In-Document Analytics enabled  has a processing
limit of approximately 5,000 records or 100 pages of output. Using the cache option you can send only the first page of content output to the browser and retrieve subsequent pages from a temporary cache on the Reporting Server. The server also becomes the resource for performing all calculations, sorting, and filtering when caching is enabled. Since caching uses on-demand paging functionality,  WebFOCUS Viewer is not supported.

Content with the cache option in the clustered server environment, using Cluster Manager (CLM), will maintain the connection with the WebFOCUS Reporting Server on which the temporary cache is created. This enables the retrieval of subsequent pages from the browser, while it is in the same browser session.

The caching feature uses a POST instead of a GET in an HTTP request.

You can save a report from your web browser to another location. You can also send a report to another person by email, as an HTML attachment. However, when you
distribute report, you must keep in mind how it will be viewed.

For example, when you send a report as an HTML attachment to email, many client email programs on a mobile device can block the JavaScript in the attachment. A third-party tool, such as the WebFOCUS Mobile app for a mobile device, may be used to correctly view the attachment.

If you try to view an interactive report in a web browser, and JavaScript is blocked or disabled on your web browser, you will receive a message reminding you that JavaScript must be enabled on the browser. If you are using a mobile device, the message directs you to use the WebFOCUS Mobile app. If the app is not installed, you can download it from the App Store® for iOS devices or from the Google Play™ store for Android™ devices. In the message, App Store and Google Play store are hyperlinks to the WebFOCUS Mobile app.

The message is displayed on the Desktop or on a supported mobile device when JavaScript is disabled in a web browser used to open an online or offline report. It is also displayed on the Preview pane or window of an application used to preview the content of an offline report.

The following image shows JavaScript disabled in Google Chrome™.