Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

In this next series of postings, I’m going to go through some of the more
advanced features of OracleBI Answers and OracleBI Interactive Dashboards, and
look at:

• Adding a control to a dashboard page that passes a parameter value to the
  reports that are embedded within it;
• Creating a view selector, so that users can switch between different views
  of the data within a report;
• Creating a column selector so that users can choose which measure to view
  in a crosstab;
• Configuring a report within a dashboard to drill in place, rather than
  launching out to a new Web page;
• Drilling from one report to another, and
• Using the guided analytics feature to display links to reports and
  dashboards based on an OracleBI Delivers alert.

Thanks to Bas Roelands from Oracle Netherlands for passing on these tips at
the end of the Netherlands BI seminar.

For the first tip, I’m going to start off with a dashboard page with a number
of reports on it. Currently, these reports are for all years, but I’d like to
add a drop-down list to the top of the report that allows me to view the reports
for a particular year. Here’s what the dashboard looks like at the moment.

To add the drop-down list, the first thing I do is switch over
to Answers and then, in the Catalog view on the left-hand side of the page,
press the "New Dashboard Prompt" button to create a new dashboard
prompt (it’s the middle button in the screenshot), like this:

I then select Global Electronics as my subject area from the
pop-up dialog, and on the next page, define the scope of my prompt as just being
the dashboard page, not the whole dashboard.

Then, using the list of available tables and columns on the
left-hand side, I pick the column that I want to use with the prompt – in my
case, "Year".

I then save the dashboard prompt, and call it "Year
Prompt".

Now, I need to include the prompt on my dashboard. I go back
over to the dashboard application, make some space for the prompt and then drag
it, from the catalog, on to the dashboard page.

Now, when I save the dashboard and view the page again, the
control is added – but at this stage it won’t affect any of the reports.

To get the reports to respond to the Year prompt, I have to add
filters in to each of them. I’ll start off by amending the Top Customer report
just below it.

After I bring up the report in Answers, I add a column for Year,
and add a filter on it using the value "is prompted". This picks up on
the value in the dashboard prompt.

Now, when I go back to the dashboard and use the drop-down list,
the values in the report change to reflect the year I select.

Finally, now I know it’s working, I go back to the request and
hide the year column so that it’s not displayed in the dashboard.

Next, I want to change the Manager Revenue report that currently
displays a line graph, to one where the user can select from several
visualizations of the data. Currently, it looks like this:

which is revenue per year broken down by marketing manager. What
I’d like to do is add another drop-down box above the the graph, allowing the
user to switch to a crosstab view of the data, or a bar chart. To do this, I go
back into Answers and add another view to the request, a "View
Selector".

Then, when defining the view selector, I select the various
charts and the crosstab view that are associated with this request.

Now, I go back to the compound view and add this view selector
in.

Now, when I go back to the dashboard, the Manager Revenue chart
has a view selector above it, which allows me to switch between a line chart, a
bar chart and a crosstab.

Tomorrow, I’ll look at how guided analytics works with BI Suite
Enterprise Edition.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »