BiLog: Explore Mornings…Reviewing custom reports for Report Upgrade to 371

Body

With the sun warming his speckled skin, and in anticipation of his breakfast of insects, Leroy loves mornings.  And similar to One Eyed Al, and the odd ostrich, I’m a member of their pack loving mornings and the explorations the day holds.

212 to 232 Upgrade
1. If you are upgrading from BIRT version 2.1.2 to the 3.7.1 in Maximo 7.5.0.3, you may encounter a more significant impact due to the greater time period and versions of the upgrade.  To understand this in detail, please review the Version 2.1.2 to 2.3.2 upgrade guide before proceeding with the upgrade to 3.7.1.   Included in this guide is a Report Upgrade report you can execute to identify potential issues with the 212 to 232 upgrade.

2.  The report update utility was originally introduced for the upgrade from 212 to 232.  Its original intent  for the 7.1 releases was for re-formatting of the page layouts for Enterprise reports.  You can download details of this utility for the Version 7.1x releases here. 

232 to 371 Upgrade
1. To evaluate what the impact could be, identify your most complex or heavily used reports and execute them from the V371 Report Designer.  This is how the Maximo Development team estimated the impact of the report upgrade – by first identifying reports that were either heavily used, critical to the business or diverse in their functionality.  Once we had that list of reports, we quickly executed them in the Report Designer to quantify the impact of the report upgrade.  

Details on how you can download and configure the 371 Report Development Guide can be found here

2.  Additionally, within the 371 Report Development guide, you can find additional best practices on the report upgrade, including the potential updates you may need to apply for hierarchy reports and data sets not defined.  These were also defined in more detail in the Bilog entry here

3. Also, for the 371 upgrade, the update utility has been updated.  As detailed in this BiLog, if you have QBR or custom reports created prior to the Maximo 7.5.0.3 release, you may want to apply this utility to enable auto layout so all fields display in the report viewer.

4.  Finally, you may experience issues with unexpected page breaks with the 371 Upgrade.   To find additional information on how page breaks are enabled within the Report Designer, and how the default page break value has changed with the 371 release, please reference the Report Page Document here.   Starting on page 27, you can review how the page break default behavior has changed, along with steps to return to your original values if you wish.