What is meta-data in BusinessObjects Enterprise or Crystal Enterprise

Synopsis

What is meta-data in BusinessObjects Enterprise or Crystal Enterprise?

Solution

BusinessObjects Enterprise and Crystal Enterprise offer two web portals for working with the enterprise environment. In BusinessObjects Enterprise, those portals will be:

• InfoView - an end user portal for viewing and scheduling report objects
• CMC - an admin portal for managing server, users, folders, reports, etc.

In Crystal Enterprise, those portals will be:

• ePortfolio - an end user portal for viewing and scheduling report objects
• CMC - an admin portal for managing server, users, folders, reports, etc.

While there's several methods to add a Crystal Report template to the enterprise environment (i.e. Save / Save As from Crystal Reports designer, Publishing Wizard, Add from InfoView / CMC / ePortfolio), no matter how you do it the end result will be:

• there will be a Crystal Reports object physically stored in the Input File Repository Server (Input FRS)
• the enterprise environment will pull out a limited amount of information from the underlaying Crystal Reports template (i.e. title, author, preview picture, database, parameters) and store this information in the CMS database

The data stored in the CMS database is the meta-data. And as you add/setup additional information associated to the Crystal Reports object stored in the enterprise environment, it won't be written back to the Crystal Report, but rather it will be additional meta-data that will be associated with the Crystal Report and stored in the CMS database. Such additional meta-data will include:

• Folder it resides in
• Groups and/or Users that have access to it
• Schedules you create for it
• Instances that have run
• Destinations
• Formats
• Database
• Parameters

But remember, none of the meta-data is ever written back to the Crystal Reports object. It is all stored in the CMS database.