Getting Started with the BI Connector Feature

The following steps give an overview of the typical workflow working with the Business Intelligence (BI) Connector feature:

• To publish resources and make them accessible from BI tools.

• To consume published resources from your BI tools, or in your form and scheduled scripts in SuiteProjects Pro.

1. Working with reports:

   1. Create and save a report in the Reports application. Include all the data you want to have access to from your BI tools.

      Note:

      If the report has collapsible levels — for example, a Customer column under which different projects roll up under — the published report data will not include the data for the sub-categories (for example, projects) if the parent level (for example, the customer) is collapsed. In the report, click show all to include all sub-categories in the published data, and hide all to exclude all sub-categories and only include the totals for the main level.

   2. [Optional] Share the report with other employees in your company.

   3. Publish the report — See Publishing Your Reports Manually

   4. [Optional] Share the published report — Choose whether you want the other employees you shared the report with to have access to the published report. See Sharing Published Reports With Other Employees in Your Company.

   5. Refresh the published report automatically — Schedule the report to be published every day, week or month if you want to refresh your published report data regularly and automatically. See Configuring SuiteProjects Pro to Publish Reports Automatically and Refresh Published Reports Periodically.

2. Working with lists:

   1. Personalize your list — Go to a supported list in SuiteProjects Pro, select list columns, change the sort order, apply column filters and save your list layout. You can use published lists like custom queries and refine the data that you want to access from your BI tools, or in your form and scheduled scripts.

   2. Publish your list as private or public — Edit the list layout properties and publish the list. Choose whether you want other employees in your company to have access to the published list. Published list data is updated in real-time. See Publishing Lists.

3. Working with your SuiteProjects Pro data in your BI tools:

   1. Connect to your published resources data — In your BI tools, connect your BI document to published resources (reports or lists) data. See Connecting BI Tools to Your OData Feed.

   2. Shape and transform your imported data — Some tools let you transform the imported data before it is displayed in the BI tool itself. You can rename or re-order your columns, for example or sort and refine the data to suit your purpose.

   3. Refresh the data automatically — Schedule automatic data refreshes in your BI tools to get the latest published resource data as often as needed. Most BI tools offer the option to refresh the data every time you open the document and at regular interval while you work with your data.

   4. Build your dashboards and reports — Use the full capability of your BI tools to build and distribute your dashboards and reports.

   Important:

   The number of requests you can send to the BI Connector feature is limited. To review your usage and the limits set for your account, go to Administration > Global Settings > Account > BI Connector limits. For more information, see BI Connector Requirements and Limits

   Note:

   Remember the difference between the different type of resources:

   • Published lists give you access to your SuiteProjects Pro data in real-time.

   • Published reports are a snapshot of your SuiteProjects Pro data at the time of publication. It is equivalent to running a report and exporting the report to a CSV file.

4. Working with your published list and report data in your form and scheduled scripts. See Reading Published Resource Data in Form and Scheduled Scripts in SuiteProjects Pro.

   Note:

   Accessing published resource data using user scripting functions does not use any of your allocated BI Connector requests.