Oracle Developer

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.

Step 1

First, we create our simple report using the SH (Sales History) database. We will display Product Category sales for the Current Month, i.e. December 2001.

Step 2

We will save the report as ‘Product Category Daily Sales’.

Step 3

The report when run should look something like this.

Step 4

We now need to create a report so that we can check when product sales exceed $150,000. This is basically a subset of the above report.

We will call it ‘Daily Sales’. The report when run should look something like this.

Step 5

We will use this report within the guided navigation to decide if we will display the “Daily Sales have exceeded Target!” message or not. We’ve set our Daily Sales Target to be $150,000 so we need to add a filter to this report.

When we run the report now we should expect the following results.

Step 6

The data we have is for the whole month of December. For this demo we’d like to pretend that the data is updated everyday and that currently we are in mid December. Let’s assume ‘today’ is the day before Christmas Eve, i.e. 23rd December 2001. To do this we need to add an additional filter.

The report should now contain 2 filters.

When we run the report (we are simulating ‘today’ being 23rd December 2001) we should get the following results.

No data is returned. This is because the sales on 23rd December 2001 were only $101,917.

Step 7

We will now create our dashboard for our Sales Report(s)

Step 8

We will now add the ‘Product Category Daily Sales’ report to our dashboard.

Step 9

Next we create a new section and add a ‘Text’ Dashboard Object.

Step 10

We click on the properties of the Text Object and add the following HTML message then save.

Step 11

We now need to set the guided navigation properties. Click on the ‘Properties’ button of the section contain the Text Object and select ‘Guided Navigation’

Step 12

Set the ‘Reference Source Request’ to ‘Yes’. Set the ‘Source Request’ to point to the ‘Daily Sales’ report and set the ‘Show Section’ to ‘If request returns row’. Click OK.

Step 13

Click ‘Save’ to  save the dashboard.  The dashboard should look like this.

We do not see any message displayed because we are currently looking at ‘23rd December 2001′ data.

Step 14

Let’s now emulate the next day arriving. Go to the ‘Daily Sales’ report and change the filter so that it now filters for Christmas Eve i.e. 24th December.

Save the report.

Step 15

Go back to the dashboard. The Dashboard should now look like this.

We obviously forced this to happen, but if you had a live dashboard then you can see the benefit of being able to quickly alert the user when important events happen with the data.