Choosing between a hierarchical columns or using a drill down depends on the purpose of the analysis, they both have positive qualities to them. Hierarchical columns allow the user to expand the column to reveal more information on the report but it also gives the option to condense the column back without affecting the selection of the data for the column. If the drill down column is used, the user will not be able to revert back to the original grouping when the dashboard was first opened because it affects both the selection steps and filters. Hierarchical columns will appear … Read More
Custom “No Rows Returned” Warning Message for a Report in OBIEE 11.1.1.x
It is good practice to have uniformity between reports on a dashboard, then it may be a good idea have a particular format for your prompts i.e. having a constant border style and font for each of them. Each report on the dashboard will look similar and it would be easier for a new user to get accustomed to OBIEE and I feel is more aesthetically pleasing. If you design your report to require a user to select prompts before it returns any roles, you may want to consider creating a consistent “no rows returned” message for the users. This … Read More
When to Use an OBIEE Analysis or BI Publisher Report?
BI Publisher Reports and Analyses are backbone pieces to help meet a business’s BI needs. They are both very flexible for their respective purposes. Being able to combine these pieces on a dashboard in a clear concise manner will give the end users an effective report. [divider] [space height=”20″] [toggle_box] [toggle_item title=”Analysis”] Requires no previous knowledge of the table structure because of predefined subject areas. Gives end users the ability to write ad-hoc reports Can create an analysis from scratch or modify an existing one on a dashboard. Users can save or share their customizations and export to various formats Can be … Read More
Formatting a Field Globally in OBIEE 11g
Some fields will have a standard way of being formatted, such as a date DD-MMM-YYYY or a dollar amount being set $x,xxx.xx. Having to format the field each time that a user wants to use it becomes quite burdensome and gives a developer more room for error if they are formatting the field each time it is used. The saying “work smarter, not harder” comes to mind with this solution. For this example we will globally change the format of the field “revenue” to the format $x,xxx.xx. Let’s open an analysis and for the sake of seeing the format prior … Read More
Misleading Statistics in Internal Developer OBIEE 11.1.1.6.2
Today, we are going to look at the demo standard deviation charts that come with the internal developer VM OBIEE 11.1.1.6.2. We’ll look at several misleading statistics that are produced with this report and suggest ways to make the page more understandable for the user. Below is the page (1) that we will be investigating. (1) Standard Deviation Page Start with the upper left graph (2), it appears to be using confidence bands on the different factors. One can think of a confidence band as a continuous confidence interval for a linear model. This data is not continuous but consists … Read More
Exporting Negative Numbers from OBIEE 11.1.1.7.0 to Excel 2007+
If you’re trying to export numeric values in OBIEE 11.1.1.7.0 to Excel 2007+, you may notice there are issues when you attempt to sum a column that has negative numbers. This problem will occur if you have a negative number’s font color set to red. Excel 2007 disregards those values when directly exported whereas if you export to Excel 2003 you will not have this issue but will lose some of the formatting from OBIEE. Proposed is an easy solution to implement that will allow users to have useful data and not be limited to where they can export to. The Problem: … Read More