BusinessObjects Enterprise Administrator's Guide

Resolving conflicts between profiles

You may encounter conflicts between profiles when users and groups have been assigned multiple profiles either directly or through inheritance. If a document is delivered to a user that has two profiles that conflict, the difference must be resolved.

For example, Tony is a manager in the Mexico office. He is assigned a profile called North America that personalizes his documents to show only data from Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The Managers group is assigned a different Management profile that personalizes the data to display data from all countries where you have sales offices.

If a document uses both of these profiles, which data will Tony see? According to one profile, he'll see data for all countries with sales offices. According to the other profile, he should see only data for North American countries.

BusinessObjects Enterprise can resolves these conflict two ways:

• Tree Walk - BusinessObjects Enterprise determines the different possible views of a publication that could be delivered and produces a unique view for each case. Determining these possible views is called walking the tree, a metaphor for following the many possible branches of the data. In the example, Tony would receive one publication personalized to show countries with sales offices, and another publication that displays North American data.
• Walk and Merge - With this setting, BusinessObjects Enterprise again determines the different possible branches of the data, but this time the non-conflicting profiles are merged into other branches of the tree. This type of profile resolution is designed for role-based security.

You can set the Profile Resolution settings when you define your publications. After you assign a profile to a document, you can set Advanced Options that choose between a Tree Walk and a Walk and Merge. For more information, see the BusinessObjects Enterprise Publisher guide.