Creation of Cascade Style Sheet

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ellissj3
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Joined: Tue Jun 15, 2010 1:43 pm
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Creation of Cascade Style Sheet

Post by ellissj3 »

I am in a situation where a client is upset at the time it takes to initially open a very large and complex Active form on the web as a websheet. The workbook itself has 30+ worksheets and multiple active form sections on each sheet. This workbook takes about 9 minutes to load the cascading style sheet into memory the first time after a service reboot. After that, this runs in about 3 minutes. My user community believes the 9 minutes is too long a wait time and has asked if I can make all runs 3 minutes.

Is there a way to automatically create the cascading style sheet? Either during startup or via some other on demand mechanism (such as a batch)?

I have investigated that a new folder is created which houses the new cascading style sheets after startup. It appears that TM1 web creates this Cascading sheet and links to it, and I do not believe you can take a previous copy into a new folder. I have searched this forum for cascading style sheet, and also the IBM knowledge center. Nothing I can find was able to address this.

1) Environment is on v10.2.2 FP2 (Latest)
Alan Kirk
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Re: Creation of Cascade Style Sheet

Post by Alan Kirk »

ellissj3 wrote:I am in a situation where a client is upset at the time it takes to initially open a very large and complex Active form on the web as a websheet. The workbook itself has 30+ worksheets and multiple active form sections on each sheet. This workbook takes about 9 minutes to load the cascading style sheet into memory the first time after a service reboot. After that, this runs in about 3 minutes. My user community believes the 9 minutes is too long a wait time and has asked if I can make all runs 3 minutes.

Is there a way to automatically create the cascading style sheet? Either during startup or via some other on demand mechanism (such as a batch)?

I have investigated that a new folder is created which houses the new cascading style sheets after startup. It appears that TM1 web creates this Cascading sheet and links to it, and I do not believe you can take a previous copy into a new folder. I have searched this forum for cascading style sheet, and also the IBM knowledge center. Nothing I can find was able to address this.
Unsurprising, as a cascading style sheet is nothing more than a description of formatting. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of a page. Indeed the whole purpose of a CSS is to separate content from style so that the content need not be manually formatted.

9 minutes after a server reboot vs 3 minutes after initial calculation? That sounds a lot more like the 3 minutes being the time it takes after the calculations are cached in memory, and 9 being the time that it takes to initially calculate them. That being the case I'd suggest that rather than the CSS, you look at pre-calculating the views that are used to power the activeform workbook, which could be done by running them through a TI after the reboot.

Though frankly I'd still look very much askance at an activeform workbook with 30+ worksheets with multiple sections. Nobody can look at 30 sheets simultaneously, which does give rise to the question of whether the thing can be broken down a lot more. Frankly even 3 minutes is something that I'd regard as excessive, and the size of the workbook itself would seem to be the principal elephant in the room, in two metaphorical senses.

Also it's worth checking that you aren't unnecessarily using live calculations in cases where writing hard coded values by TI might be a better approach, but we don't know enough about your data for anyone to be able to advise on that point.
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ellissj3
Posts: 54
Joined: Tue Jun 15, 2010 1:43 pm
OLAP Product: Cognos TM1
Version: 9.0 - 10.2
Excel Version: 2010

Re: Creation of Cascade Style Sheet

Post by ellissj3 »

Alan,

Thank you for the response. I agree with you regarding the size of the report. I wasn't involved when it was created and I advised the client around breaking this out (unsuccessfully). I will look into your recommendation around caching the data into memory on the server.
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