External strings in OBIEE - not only useful for localization...
One thing I am quite frequently asked by my customers is how to display the name of a measure and its corresponding base unit of measure (e.g. TCHF for Thousand CHF) in one column of my report. For those of you familiar with the external names there is one very comfortable way to handle this. If you are not yet deep into handling external contents from tables here some recommendable reads: Venkat did a good one, John also wrote about and last but not least there is my blog around that subject.
Coming to the heart of this blog post:
once upon a time when playing around with the external names table I tried to embed HTML tags into the table and found out that it is possible. Oh yeah ! First thing I tried is to implement that example mentioned, showing a measure alligned left with its approprate unit of measure alligned right . And after a little while playing around with the correct HTML-syntax. Attaboy, there we are.
<table border=''0'' width=''100%''><tr><td width=''250''>Sales</td><td align =''center''>[TCHF]</td></tr></table>
What I also like is that you can display all the different special characters you sometimes need. Here for the upped 2 for the square metre in the german language
<table border=''0'' width=''100%''><tr><td width=''250''>Area</td><td align=''center''>[m²]</td></tr></table>
So, in the end what you have to do is :
- mark your column(s) for which you want external names be shown in Answers instead of the default column names (right click, activate the bottom two buttons)
- from the menu use Tools / Externalize names to get all relevant columns out of your repository
- give your columns appropriate names in the before retrieved file
- create a table and insert your names
- for all measures use the above syntax
- define the connection pool and the init block to get the external names properly (see my blog under chapter 1 for this) in your repository
And with this you can really make your users, customers or simply just a friend of yours very very happy. It really looks stunning, doesn't it ?
BTW: Fläche = german for area.
One tip: copy one whole language in your excel file to a specific language (e.g. xx), so that you can develop easier. With the names of the columns displayed in HTML this is kind of creepy.
So long,
Andreas