Andreas Nobbmann

Guided Navigation between Dashboard pages

Andreas Nobbmann — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:35:00 GMT

Despite I assume most of you know that there is a little special thing you have to take care for in order to achieve proper inter-dashboard-navigation I wanted to post this shortly.

One of the most powerful features of OBIEE is the navigation between the different dashboards and reports. This is running very smooth and easy, generously said "only" by setting the filters for whatever column you want
to use to be prompted. But only for columns from the same business model (better presentation catalog).

If you want to connect two dashboard-pages from different presentation catalogs (let's say Sales and for example Costs), then you have to pay attention for the following requirements of OBIEE :

- the logical column and logical table must have the exact same name in the two catalogs
- if not you can define an Alias for the table and it is running again.

In pictures it looks like that :

You can see that all logical colums and tables have the same name. If not you can define an alias on the table as well as on the column. In presentation layer double-click on the presentation table or column, select Alias and create an Alias. By the way: if you rename a logical table, OBIA (Oracle BI Administration Tool) creates the Aliases automatically.

I would not recommend to create Aliasing for columns, because it gets confusing and is pretty fast not administrable anymore. Of course you can see the defined alias' in your UDML, but it is not obvious for somebody reading your repository the first time.

So long,
Andreas

Using your own images within OBIEE

Andreas Nobbmann — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:34:00 GMT

Oracle BI - suites provide a lot of flexibility to extend your BI-applications with variable content in order to face all challenges to customize a solution to your needs. Hence, today I will write something about adding your personal / company-pictures to the Dashboards, Answer-reports etc.

First you have to think about how to customize your style, which is not easy due to so many possibilities. Finally Skins, Styles, CSS, Banner-images and so on are pretty clearly described in chapter 10 of the OBIEE Presentation Service Admin Guide. Today I like to restrict my writing on the style- and skin-side. It is more a build your appetite instead of claiming to be the complete answer-catalogue to your questions.

All default skin-related files are found in the directory OracleBI\web\app\res\sk_oracle10, the correlating styles in the same directory, under s_oracle10. This folders you can copy to OracleBIData\web\app\res\sk_YourFolder (or s_YourFolder for style) and adapt all files within this directory to your wishes. After you have restarted the presentation services you have this style available in your dashboard-properties .

You can define your standard-skin in the well-known instanceconfig.xml by adding the entry <DefaultStyle>NameofYourStyle</DefaultStyle>. The name of your skin has to begin with sk_, of your style with s_, but the rest of the name must not contain underscores.

Here you see multiple subfolders where you can arrange your images or other files.

Most of them have speaking names, Charts for the different chart-types, Gauges for the gauges, etc. Images is generally the folder for the pictures, in Meters you find the standard-structure you get right after you click on image in your edit column-dialog-window.

Cheers,

Andreas

"Percent of" in OBIEE pivot-tables

Andreas Nobbmann — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:24:00 GMT

I guess some of you might have used the neat function "Percent of" in the pivot-tables of OBIEE. Cool stuff ! And this easy to implement. Just click and say "Show Data as" "Percent of" and choose column, row, section, page, column parent, row parent or layer.

And you are done, that's it !

Comes along very useful !

Anyhow, just had a request from a customer wanting the percentage more accurate, with 2 decimals after the point. OK, I thought, should not be this difficult to find. But far out....

After a while I had checked all the formatting-options in Answers and Dashboards in depth, but still no clue where to in the end change that setting. Hence my last desperate consultant-try was to examine the pure XML-code for further hints. Et voila I got it.

If you want also 2 places after the decimal-separator go to the advanced tab of your OBIEE-frontend, copy the complete XML-request in a editor (wordpad or so, unfortunately you cannot search in the HTML-window in OBIEE directly), do a !!! BACKUP of the XML !!! first and then search for "saw:percent". Right after this there are two parameters for this type of display-schema <minDigits> and <maxDigits>.

<saw:dataFormat xsi:type="saw:percent" minDigits="1" maxDigits="1" scale="2"/></saw:displayFormat></saw:showAs>

Here the complete procedure :

1. set both the minDigits- and maxDigits-value to 2 (Attention: please change nothing else, neither in formatting, nor in adding a row, a tab or only a carriage return or something else.),

2. copy the complete text from within your wordpad,

3. clear the complete XML-window,

4. paste the changed XML-code in the most upper window (make sure you did not leave out any row/character of the changed XML),

5. click Set XML

6. do not save the report immediately, go back to the result-tab first and check the outcome. Now, if all went well save your report.

So, you have OBIEE showing the value properly the way you want.

I thought I found the standard-setting for the "percent-of"-function within the file pivotvieweditor.js sitting in the directory \oracleBI\web\app\res\b_mozilla\views\, but despite there are values hard-coded for <minDigits> and <maxDigits> in the function "PTCreatePercentOf" unfortunately it doesn't effect new PercentOf-columns in Pivots. Anyhow I do not give up and will find and post it as soon as I got something.

So, that's for today. Have a good time and so long,

Andreas

Good news: you really need no mouse for Oracle BI EE Administrator

Andreas Nobbmann — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:51:00 GMT

As a person who absolutely dislikes pushing the mouse on the table too much the Oracle BI-suite is not exactly what I prefer working with. Although having this personal attitude to work with shortcuts I – surprisingly enough - have to admit that there are some cool features in OBI EE’s administrator-tool that make the mouse the best next move for Data Modelling.

Let me say a word to myself, not long ago I started my professional life as a BI-consultant and in detail I am a divided-by-three person, one third a IBM, another one a Oracle-Data Warehouse- and the last third a Hyperion-guy. Perhaps not this usual, but it went this way for me. Hence in this Blog I’d like to write about whatever platform I am working with actually – trying to be neutral and not to favour one solution. I am a lucky One, since not so long my BI-heart is not divided by three, but only by two due to the fact Oracle bought Hyperion. Thanks to Oracle!
So my blogs should cover both, either Oracle BI EE & Hyperion (hopefully soon the applications also) or IBM Balanced Warehouse, Data Warehouse Edition, DB2 UDB etc. Let’s await what’ll come, I’m curious what’ll be anyhow.

Now, let’s come to my subject today: No Mouse in OBIEE’s administrator-tool.

As I’ve learned last year during a Proof of concept in America and meanwhile read several times in this superb blogs from Mark Rittman, Dylan Wan and different others there is a possibility to script the RPD-file in a very old-fashioned way. Pretty much like you do it if you create an HTML-page without this WYSIWYG-editors like Dreamweaver etc. In the end you can you can simply paste the text of your scripted model (see example-picture from Oracle's sales-model below) in your OBI EE Administrator-tool and this software interpretes the underlying syntax for you and visualizes it into this portion of client/server-tool.

(or check http://blog.trivadis.com/blogs/andreasnobbmann/Blog_UDML_PhysicalLayer_PaintDemo.rtf for Download it as an RTF-file)

For starting with scripting I’d like to recommend reading the following two blogs, they inform you generally about the usage of UDML – the Universal Database Markup Language in OBIEE. Mark Rittman does more in detail. Thanks to both of them for the great blogs they are continuously writing!

The first one comes from Dylan Wan (http://dylanwan.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/udml-in-oracle-bi-server/),

the second one from Mark Rittman (http://www.rittmanmead.com/2007/10/27/scripting-entries-in-the-oracle-bi-repository/).

When I first noticed that scripting is possible I was interested to find more information about the syntax of it – in order to have the pool of possibilities for configuring and defining my models.

Because UDML is a non supported and undocumented feature of Oracle (and not yet carved in stone – it seems) I have not found any documentation on this in the web, so I decided to do the work and discover the different syntax-options of UDML so far. Today it’s physical-layer-time and I’ll try to illustrate the syntax in a mindmap.

One hint to the database-features which can be overwritten in the database-properties (in the second tab). They are stored in an ini-file under BI_HOME/server/config/DBFeatures.INI. If you click restore to default on the features-tab he takes the values as given there.

But now – as mentioned I want to be neutral (also for this Pro-Mouse/Con-Mouse-point) - a very smooth and clever mouse-move I learned during the advanced OBIEE-training last week at Oracle in Dreieich near Frankfurt am Main / Germany.

Let’s say you have 2 fact-tables, one with fine-granular sales-details (say costs & sales as measures) , the other one already aggregated on a monthly basis. To let BI Server know of this big SQL-cost-saving advantage you have to define multiple logical table sources in your Business model. My way to achieve this was always to add the complete table, remove the unneeded and then map the rest of the columns accordingly, but as I stunningly saw last week you can simply drag the sales-column from the aggregate physical table and drop it over to the already existing sales-column in the business-model and OBI-administrator does everything else for you.
I simply never had this idea just because this anti-mouse-revolution in my head, I have to think about that.

By the way and because it’s related to UDML: there was a really good blog I read last time regarding automating the repository updates if you have multiple environments e.g. production, test and development. Thanks to Venkatakrishnan J for his words!

Here it is : http://oraclebizint.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/oracle-bi-ee-101332-udml-to-automate-repository-updates-migration-of-repositories-from-development-to-testproduction-environment/

And one little story for the end how Oracle BI makes life easier – at least in the UK. So, think about it when flying from Manchester.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/01/07/228771/manchester-airport-lifts-one-bag-rule-with-oracle.htm

Enjoy reading !

Cheers and until next time, then probably with UDML- part 2 for the Business Model-part.

Andreas