Oracle Developer

A number of times I’ve worked on projects where the client is using Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One (OBISE1) but have not had the time or resources to install development and production versions of the application. Thus, other than developing on the production OBISE1 installation I’ve had to develop on my own application, which happens to be OBIEE.

Oracle basically sellls the two versions as one being the entry level version (OBISE1) and the second being the ‘all dancing’ enterprise version (OBIEE). Theoretically they are the same except that OBISE1 hasn’t all the functionality as OBIEE. A user can very happily start with OBISE1 and when the time comes that they need more functionality or need to upgrade their license for more users then they can seemlessly switch to the enterprise edition, OBIEE.

Logically it would make sense that the two versions are the same, except that OBISE1 has some of the functionality disabled. Logic doesn’t always work in business and it turns out that they are not the same. In fact, they are different versions of thee same tool, OBISE1 being an older version than OBIEE. And it is this fact that makes developing in OBIEE and moving the rpd repositiory to OBISE1 interesting.
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With the correct heirarchy setup in the Business Model and Mapping area an Answers report will drill down to each successive level. Each level logically being a child of the previous level. However, what happens if we’d like to drill down to data that isn’t part of a heirarchy but is logically child data? In that case we need to use guided navigation to obtain our results.

In this tutorial we will produce a report which details the total amount sold throughout the world in each city of each country. We then want to drill down into the city to find a detailed breakdown of all the products which were sold in that city.

To start we need to produce the 2 reports we want. After that we can then add the guided navigation to enable us to drill down into the detailed report. Read the rest of this entry »

As well as calling any of the Oracle predefined functions you can also create and use your own user defined functions in OBI Answers.

For this example we will create a function that formats a customer’s name and use this function in a report.

Step 1

First we will create a simple report. Read the rest of this entry »

The initial setup for this tutorial is explained in the post Custom CSS Style Options (HTML Only). As well as being able to define a style (or styles) to use for a field it is possible to create and use a user defined (custom) CSS class.

Step 1

Let’s change the styles used for the ‘Product List Price’ by assigning a new custom class to this field. This class will apply styles that will make the ‘Product List Price’ values have a blue background with yellow text, with a white border, be double in size and shifted in from the right.  To do this we need to know which CSS styles to use in the class.

We need to use the following:

• background-color (for the blue background)
• color (to change the font colour)
• border(for the white border)
• font-size (for doubling size)
• padding-right (for indentation from the right

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When you go into the ‘Column Properties’ option of a field in OBI Answers you will see the following options at the bottom of the popup properties screen.

The following details how to use the last option, ‘Custom CSS Style Options (HTML Only)’.
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The initial setup for this tutorial is explained in the post Custom CSS Style Options (HTML Only).

Step 1

Let’s change the default style used for the Product Name. We shall indent the the product name, change it to uppercase, add some space beneath each product and make the text pink. To do this we need to know which CSS styles to use.

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With an OBI dashboard it is possible to control logically what sections will appear and when. We do this using ‘Guided Navigation’. For example, we may have a sales report which each day displays the number of sales per salesperson. However, near the end of the month we may wish to highlight which salespeople are below target. We still want to keep our original report in the dashboard, we’d just like a highligted list (if any) of those who are currently below target. We do this using Guided Navigation.

For this example I will use the SH (Sales History) database that comes with Oracle and OBI. The database does not contain sales people so I cannot emulate the above example. The scenario I’d like to create is a report which lists daily sales in the current month of product categories. The “Current Month” in the SH database is actually December 2001. We will emulate the “current date” by placing a day filter in the report. As well as a report of product category sales I’d like to display the following message: “Daily Sales have exceeded Target!” if sales are over $150,000 on that day.
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After Adding a Filter perform the following steps to create a Saved Filter:

Step 1

Click on the ‘Save Filter’ button

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To create a simple perform the following steps:

Step 1

Select the Sales History (SH) Subject Area

Step 2

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There are a lot of good tutorials out there on Oracle Business Intelligence (formerly Siebel Analytics) Standard Edition (OBISE1) and Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). So, I really do not want to reinvent the wheel. What I have found is that it is the simple things that can sometimes be confusing. The sort of things that a detailed tutorial will assume you know, or ones that you do know, it’s just slipped your mind.
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