Archive for the ‘Oracle Business Intelligence’ Category

OBI Answers: Drill Down to a Different Report

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

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. (more…)

OBI Answers: User Defined Functions

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

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. (more…)

OBI Answers: Use Custom CSS Class

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

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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OBI Answers: Custom CSS Style Options (HTML Only)

Friday, December 4th, 2009

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.

column_properties_additional_formatting_links

The following details how to use the last option, ‘Custom CSS Style Options (HTML Only)’.
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OBI Answers: Use Custom CSS Style

Friday, December 4th, 2009

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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OBI Answers: Guided Navigation Section Properties

Friday, November 27th, 2009

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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OBI Answers: Add a Filter

Monday, November 16th, 2009

To create a simple perform the following steps:

Step 1

Select the Sales History (SH) Subject Area
sh_subject_area

Step 2

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OBISE1 and OBIEE Tutorials

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

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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