Business Intelligence

Hide dashboard objects in OBIEE

BI Future

How to hide a column or section from the dashboard display?

This workaround allows you to embed dashboard objects that are hidden from the view. Using this property you can hide Dashboard Column, Section or Alert Section objects. To hide particular reports or prompt you need to put them inside the hidden column or section.

We will need to use CSS formating to hide the dashboard elements. First, go to the top right corner of the column or section you want to hide and click on Format Section (or Format Column):

HideDashboardObjectsOBIEE1

Click on Custom CSS Style Options (HTML Only) and check Use Custom CSS Style.HideDashboardObjectsOBIEE2

In the text box put:

display: none;

The element with this property won’t be displayed on the dashboard. Note that this affects only the display of the dashboard, if you export the dashboard contents to a PDF the objects hidden with the CSS formatting will be visible.

Go back to report prompts with a custom button in OBIEE

BI Future

When a prompt is added to a report in OBIEE, it will ask user to provide the prompt values when the report is opened. Report results will be filtered by the values chosen by user in prompts. After that, user can’t change the report’s filtering condition as the prompts are no longer visible. To solve this, we will add  GoBackToReportPrompt04 button with a link to take the user back to prompts.

How to add Go to Prompts button to the report?

Let’s add a Static Text view in report’s results page.

AddStaticTextViewOBIEE1

Inside the Static Text view check the Contains HTML Markup box and add the following HTML code:

<button onclick="window.location.href='saw.dll?PortalGo&Action=prompt&path=%2Fshared%2FReports%2FSales' ">Go to Prompts</button>

replacing the path= parameter with the path to the report starting with forward slash / (%2F in URL encoding).

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Below the Static Text field you can see the preview of the button. Add the Static Text view to report’s Compound Layout.

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Now the report displays ‘Go to Prompts’ button that takes user back to prompts.

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Correct order by Month date in OBIEE

BI Future

How to order by month number not alphabetically by month name?

When you add a column with MON or MONTH date format in OBIEE report its values would be sorted alphabetically, not by the month number order. That way December would come before January etc. To sort by months in their correct order we need a date in a month number format (1 for January, 2 for February etc.).

Order_by_Month_Obiee1

There are two solutions for this:

Change in repository

To avoid such issues, a date column with Month name should have a proper sorting order. This can be done in the repository, by setting sorting order by another date column with correct order (Month Number) in a logical layer. In the logical layer click on Month column’s criteria and change the Sort order column settings to order it by Month number column (it should be available in Date dimension).

Sort_by_Month

Workaround in BI Answers

There is also a workaround solution to achieve correct month order in Oracle BI Answers. To solve this, add the full date column from the same dimension, change the formula to evaluate date in YYYY-MM format.

EVALUATE('TO_CHAR(%1,%2)' AS CHARACTER (30), "Date Column", 'YYYY-MM')

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Now you can add the column to the table or graph and set the sorting by that column. The values will be sorted by column name. You can hide the Month Number column so its values are not visible in the report.

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Create a dummy (blank) column in OBIEE

BI Future

Sometimes we need to add a dummy column to OBIEE report. This is specially true for combine request reports (acting as unions) when we need only the values from one part of the union and nulls or zeroes for the other. To acheive that, we need to add a column with either null or zero value (depending on our requirement). The values to put inside the dummy column’s formula are different, depending on the column’s data format.

If the column is used as a dummy in combine request report it should have the same column type as its respective column in the other part of report – numeric, text or date. Otherwise you’ll get the ODBC error in results.

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To create a dummy column with null or zero value, add a column to the report’s criteria and change its formula to one of the below:

Column with numeric values

CAST(null as DOUBLE)
Dummycolumn05 or
0
Dummycolumn07

Text column

null
Dummycolumn04 or
” (two single quotes)
Dummycolumn06

Date column

CAST(null as DATE)
Dummycolumn03