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I guess we could rename this the BOBJ/SAP rant, but instead we’re just going to stick with ’3 Xcelsius Components to Avoid’! Unfortunately, some of these components were also on our Xcelsius 4.5 list. We really thought that BOBJ would put some more work into them for the Xcelsius 2008 rewrite….but they obviously had more pressing issues to deal with.
Pick #1 - Panel Set
- Definition – We couldn’t find one in the manual so here is ours: The worse Xcelsius component ever built!
- Symptoms – Major file size Increase, Instability, Performance Issues, 100%+ CPU Usage
- Workarounds – Xcelsius Tab Set Component, Use of iFrames in HTML page
Pick #2 - List Builder
- Definition – The List Builder provides a way for users to build their own sets of data. The List Builder consists of a Source list containing all possible selections, a Destination list containing the user’s selections, and an Update button. Users can move items between the Source and Destination lists in a number of ways. Only component that allows users to input multiple selections at one time.
- Symptoms – Major file size Increase, Performance Issues, 100%+ CPU Usage
- Workarounds – Hope that someone will create a custom flex component in the Xcelsius 2008 Marketplace soon that works. Would be nice to see this functionality in one of the other ‘Selector’ components…List View maybe.
Pick #3 - Panel Container
- Definition – The Panel Container components act as smaller canvases within the main canvas and hold one or more components. Components in the Panel Container can be moved, added, changed or deleted.
- Symptoms – Major file size Increase, Instability, 100%+ CPU Usage
- Workarounds – Xcelsius Tab Set Component, Use of background images / dynamic visiblity
After encountering a few clients who designed their UI around these components, only to have to abandon them last minute due to performance issues, we felt this article was a must.
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Thank you! I am preparing an xcelsius presentation for a very important job interview with little time.. you saved me so much time and potential failure! thank you1
Thanks for the comment. Glad to know we could save you some time! That was the goal of the article.
strange, i’ve never had a problem with using the containers (panels). perhaps because i was only using them for a few tables and graphs. i’m not using them to create new dashboards, but more to display information contained in a nice border.
Using Save scenario Component.
Seems buggy. It will always save the vissual setting but does not always trigger the webi or QAAWS queries. Have seen queries also come back using the default radio button selection instead of selection in the saved scenario even though it looks selected.
Seems like the visual component and the afected speadsheet cells get out of sync.
Has anyone else experienced the Saved scenario button being unreliable?
Are there optional “List Builder” add-ons available? How do we address the need for a multi-select capability? Thanks in advance!
Hi Phil,
Can’t think of any that I know of, but you may want to check out either covizxl.com or centigonsolutions.com to see what they have.
Mico
Hmm,
don’t use these components but still running into performance issues.
I’ve a set of 3 tables that are linked to each other and also 3 selector boxes to drive a line chart.
The source file isn’t too big, less then 2MB, the swf file is 1.3 MB.
I didn’t have a problem in the previous Xcelsius version 4.5 but since I’m on 2008 (5..3.1.0) the flashfile takes up to 7 seconds to respond to a change in the selector boxes or tables.
I’ve also got MS office 2007 installed. I wonder if this could have impacted the xcelsius performance as well?
Dieter
Dieter,
Sounds like you may have a ton of formulas on the back end perhaps?
Also, you want to keep the .swf under 1MB.
Mico
Having recently been working on a very complex model which used a series of tab sets, we have found these to be very hungry for power and through a process of replacing these with a combination of backgrounds and label based menus found that this helped substantially.
Model still loads slowly but this may be due to number of components in use (approaching 1,000!) and hence file size – SWF is now in excess of 2Mb but once loaded switches between menu options quote slickly.
David,
Thanks for adding this one. I originally ignored it because its so widely used, but internally we do the same thing. We simply use labels and dynamical visibility and have seen much better performance. We may write a quick tip blog post about this in the near future.
Mico