Quickly promote or copy a PAW book

[gtonkin]

Ever needed to quickly copy a PAW Book from Dev to Prod or Prod to Dev?
You could use the Lifecycle Management to do this but it takes time to select, map, copy over move etc. etc.

To short-circuit this you could simply copy the code behind the book and paste it into the new book.

Access the book specification using Ctrl + Q + /
Copy this to your clipboard.
Create a new book in the environment you need it, open up the board specification and update from your clipboard.
Update the specification then Save your book into the desired location and you are done.

For the more adventurous, you can edit the specification to reference control objects e.g. when syncing action buttons and applying security requiring }Clients or }Groups.

Also useful should you have some code snippets you want to inject into the sheets/books e.g. an image at a certain location, similar to pinned objects.

[Wim Gielis]

Thans you George. Just to add that on my keyboard it is Ctrl-q-:
This is an Azerty keyboard, which is popular in my country.

[Adam]

This is a good one, not sure why this is hidden away. Might be a good IBM PA AMA question for next time.

I’ve also used this for pixel perfect column width across sheets, which can be important for some users.

[ascheevel]

Great stuff, thanks for sharing George. This must be a small product of the initiative to bring the cognos and and planning analytics teams closer together. Copying report specifications in report studio was a much appreciated feature.

[Emixam]

This is a life changer !! Thanks a lot for sharing

[David Usherwood]

I've just done some testing of this. My findings so for are that it works for pointing an existing briefing (or copy) to the same cube on another server, but it does not work for pointing an existing briefing (or copy) to a second cube (with the same dimensions and view name). Clicking the Settings coglike icon on the right and selecting Context Information shows a connection to the old cube.
Suggestions welcome. This would be very handy for testing and reconcilation.

[gtonkin]

Should all be text in the JSON file - have you done a find and replace?

Trick is to find the correct reference to update and there is possibly also some kind of save state which may be base 64 encoded (and may have a reference that you need to tweak too). I have not tried to update to a different cube myself so guesswork at this stage.

Edit: The query state is Base64 encoded. If you copy it out to a site like https://base64.guru/converter/decode/file, you can save the resulting file which is in fact a Zip file. From there you can unzip to view the query.json file within the archive. This does seem to keep the various widget settings.

[Adam]

Nice little use case:

When creating an action button in PAW and you link it to a process, when setting parameter picklist, you cannot specify control dimension, e.g. }Clients.

So pick some other dimension, then do Ctrl + Q + / and you can find/replace all references of the dummy dimension with the intended control dimension, e.g. }Clients.

Works like a charm!

[Steve Rowe]

Worth noting that I can not get this to work with workbenches, rather annoying.

Does anyone know of a method of promoting / repointing a workbench?

They do not show up in Lifecycle Management either