How to leverage flash variables in Dashboard Design
Oftentimes, there will be the requirement to link a dashboard to another WebI report that provides more detail of the data presented. If you are using BICS to publish the dashboard to Netweaver portal, you will be using the standard SAP transport mechanism to transport the underlying BEx queries and the dashboard file. But how does the dashboard know that it has to launch the WebI report from production server as opposed to the development server? You will be embedding the server URL inside the dashboard for it to make the call to the WebI report and one way to handle this situation is to change the URL before making the transport to production. But this is obviously not an elegant solution. A better solution is to handle this via flash variables. All you have to do is to add a new data connection of type flash variables. SAP provides standard variables that we can leverage to get more information about the SWF page and its context. We use the variable - "BISCWS_ENDPOINT" to get the URL of the portal where this dashoard is loaded.
Here is what we get as the value for this flash variable when it is linked to a label in dashoard:
Once the variable is linked to a cell, you can use this value to do a lookup against a pre-defined server names and in this way, we can dynamically resolve the host name for the WebI report.