You have to integrate reporting in your portal. You have read the documentation that comes along with the SDK, and you have learned that it will take you a substantial time to understand the internals of the Business Objects system on the one hand and, based on that knowledge, have to work out best practices about how to use the SDK depending on different document types, prompt types, etc.

But in reality, you'd rather want to concentrate on the job you've got to do, and that was to integrate reporting in your portal.

BOInterface allows you to do just that - concentrate on your job and let the BOInterface take care of the right use of the various Business Objects SDKs. BOInterface is a layer on top of the SDK that levels out historically grown differences between document types, prompt types, etc. and greatly cuts down the amount of code you've got to write. Displaying a document in PDF can be as short as one single line of code.

The included Servlet Filter Framework allows you to personalize the InfoView Web Application without changing a single line of InfoView code. This way you can easily put your system back in a supported state.

You may also want to check out the RepositoryExplorer that has been created on top of BOInterface - the code that was specific to the Business Objects SDK, using BOInterface, was less then 10 lines!

BOInterface comes with an extensive documentation covering UML diagrams right in the Javadoc, ready-to-compile code examples.

Now you may ask, what are the downsides? Business-wise, you'll have to license the BOInterface for a maximum of 5 consulting days. Technically, BOInterface does not limit you in any way in the things you can do. You can build your applications using the BOInterface for the standard as well as the most complex tasks - and at any time write your own Business Objects SDK code for tasks that have not been implemented in the BOInterface. You can even pass back information like a handle to a document to the BOInterface, thus having a two-way process of doing the right thing the right way.