In this final posting in the series, I’ll be looking at three more tips and techniques for Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition.
The first one is around adding a column selector to a crosstab report. To take an example, on my dashboard there’s a crosstab (or pivot table, in Siebel Analytics-speak) that currently displays a number of measures by market segment and channel. It’d be nice if this same report would support analysis by a number of dimensions and channel, not just market segment,
To put this feature in place, I go into Answers and add a new view – a “Column Selector” view.
Now, I can add any valid columns from the column selector and make them available, for substitution, instead of market segment.
Now, when I go back to the compound view, add this column selector view in and suitably alter the title, I can use the same report to analyze by any of these dimensions.
Now, using the same report, let’s say I want to alter it so that if the user clicks on any of the sales channel headers – Catalog, Direct or Internet – it launches into a new report using the Channel value as a parameter. The report I wish to link to is a bar chart showing units sold for that channel over time, like this:
However – here’s the good bit – I only want to display it for the channel that’s been clicked on. To do this, I add a filter to the channel column, and specify “Is Prompted” as the condition, so as to pick up the parameter passed across from the drill action.
Now, I go back to my original crosstab report, and edit the column properties for Channel, setting the value interaction to “Navigate”.
Then, I pick up the report to navigate to.
Now, when the user views the crosstab, the Channel values are hyperlinks…
which, when clicked on, bring up our barchart for that particular channel.
Finally, I want to add this new crosstab into my dashboard, but alter the default behavior of a dashboard element so that the crosstab drills in place, rather than launching out to a separate window – the barchart will always pop up, this is what I want – but I can drill and alter the crosstab in place within the dashboard. To do this, I add the crosstab as usual to my dashboard, but this time, select “Drill in Place” from the section properties, like this:
Now, when I drill into the hierarchies in this crosstab, the crosstab stays within the dashboard, only launching out when I request the bar chart report on channel sales.
As I said before, thanks again to Bas Roelands from Oracle Netherlands for passing on the techniques.
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