Dashboards & Modules For New Instance of LBI

Just to clarify we actually copied the reporting schedmas from one env(prod) to this brand new environment called Dev. On dev when I login to Framewrok services the dashboards and reports are missing.

The reults of the import shows that reporting services is renaming the report ids to a different id. since we are copying the lawson documents repository on the prod environment to dev, these report ids will not sync up with the new ids that were created during import as a result of which we may lose all the historical instances.

I hope the above does not seem too confusing.

I dont believe there is no straight forward way of doing this. If you install 9.0.1.1 there is a migration tool that might help, then you would have to upgrade to 9.0.2.2 then to 9.0.3.1, otherwise you will have to manually publish all the reports and their historical instances. I havent looked to see what happens with the historical instances when you import the parent report with a solution pack but this might be a way.

I wouldnt suggest copying the database repository from one env to another. In the past the LBI repository has stored literal references to the registered machine names in binary fields and this can cause massive issues.

Thanks Matt for replying. We are using an upgrade path of 9.0.2.2 to 9.0.3.1. So we actually installed 9.0.2.2. Our prod env is also 9.0.2.2. It as all of the dashboards modules reports etc on it. We copied all the reporting schema and all the data to the other environment. however when I login to the dashboards I am not able to see all of the modules and reports. It has missing information. At this point I am investigating to see why the data did not get copy over since both the environment are on the same LBI version ? Is there anything else that we needed to do? Will a copy resolve the missing data or because of the binary mappings we should use a data migration path insted of data copy?

Ruma: I have actually seen this happen to us. All of the "sharing" information doesn't always transfer across for some reason. If you are an admin for LBI, you can always go into "Content" under the Manage Content section of Tools and step down through it that way.
Another thing I've noticed is sometimes the "Show in Menu Bar" option gets unchecked for the dashboards themselves.
You can solve that through the "Content" link as well.

Thanks Greg for your reply. After long hours of stressing out on the lbi metdata and thinking more on what Matt mentioned about how the metadata is stored as blobs in the lbi schema we came up with this. Way back we realized that some of the metadata for LBI was stored as blobs that had binary mappings. If we copied these tables and tried to change the values in this field it also changed the values in the environment that the values originally came from.

After realizing this, all the admins decided that LBI can never have the same data on 2 environments unless you manually create every report, module, link etc in 2 environments to keep them the same. If at any point the number of reports in one environment is different from the othre to keep both of them the same would be imposssible also because of the lawson documents repository.

So I made a decision to have a system with a fresh install that had no reports etc on it so I can build from there. If I copied or imported the dashboards and the way lawson renames the reportids the lawson documents repository would never be the same on both. I would be spending more time on trying to correct these data mapping issues between the module ids, report ids etc then actually adding value to the upgrade.

The risk I am running is there are no reports that exist that have a year of instances so i would have any clue as to how upgrading to 9.0.3.1 will behave which I at this point have no choice but accept.

However whoever has upgraded from 9.0.2.2 to 9.0.3.1 - Can you share any experiences?

Thanks for all the input.

Hi Ruma: I hope I have some good news for your LBI upgrade from 9.0.2.2 to 9.0.3.1. I recently moved a 9.0.1.10 server to 9.0.3.1 and the reports are running as expected. The production server upgrade is planned for the end of this month. Our move included a new server and updating to SQL2005 and WAS6.1 as the same time.

Plan on installing every service pack and patch in sequence as well as running the install validators. There are database updates at pretty much every level so it is import to be in sequence. Start by copying your 9.0.2.2 database to the new server before installing 9.0.3.0. After taking each of these steps our initial testing looked good and is currently in user validation.

One thing we did find was that a database change at 9.0.3.0 broke some of the dashboard links which are greater than 7 layers deep. This has to do with a performance change and how the links are stored, Lawson is checking on this. If you do not have nested sub-links on your dashboards I would not expect this problem.

I hope this helps.