Drilldown characteristics limit of 50

Question

Is there a way to work around the limit in BEX of only allowing 50 drilldown characteristics for the default display? I understand you can display up to the limit, then execute the report and drilldown further on free characteristics. But we want to be able to show more than 50 columns without having to drill down.
Does anyone know of a setting that we can change to increase the limit?

Answer 1

Hi,
that is Reader plugin limitation itself not Adobe AIR (Air uses Adobe Reader as pluggable feature - it depends on it installed on system and there is api to detect that feature support with "pdfCapability" property of HTMLLoader). It is also affecting other 3rd party tools that are using pluggable Reader interface.
see for example:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2128581
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2432520
What you could do:
#1
manage numbers of created instances - but as you noted that is clunky.
In addition I think you're eating system resources to have a pool of dozens of PDF readers
Instead you could use:
#2
combined pooling of PDF instances.
Why combined? to preserve memory you don't need to show actual PDF to user
- you have set of PDF (HTMLLoaders) instances in application pool and use them to load different documents
- because that nearly impossible for user to view all that content at the same time (readability) you could reuse instances to load different documents on demant
*and*
- here is a trick to minimize memory:
- once your HTMLLoader loads document - that is to be no longer used - you could take "screen shot" of it (that is current page) and re-use HTMLLoader instance to load other content.
To let user know what is loaded you show bitmap image in e.g. clickable container of your choice (you could have tile group that display pages )
How to get screen shot:
- add Event.COMPLETE to your html loader so it fires when pdf loads and then e.g.:
protected function htmlCompleteHandler(completeEvent:Event):void
     var bd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(html.width, html.height);
     bd.draw(html.htmlLoader);
     var image:Image = new Image();
     image.width = bd.width;
     image.height = bd.height;
     image.source = bd;
I think that you could even transform what is drawn to have small and nice thumbnails of non-active documents that way.
kind regards,
Peter