OBIEE OLAP on 11G

http://obieestuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/obiee-plug-in-for-oracle11g-olap-option.html

I really need some r&d time soon..... so much to learn....

Till Next Time

OBIEE not all change is good change

Recently I had to do some C work of a MoSCoW list on a 10.3.3.3 system. The customer wanted français on the dropdown list at the logon screen written as Français:

With the help of Christi@n I recovered from my brain freeze and started editing a copy of languagenames.xml in the general customMessages folder:

A quick reboot of the presentation server a the problem was fixed:

Well not really......As most students in the Netherlands I dropped my French classes ASAP in high school. My knowledge of the French language is restricted to "Papa fume un pipe dans le jardin..." (Dad smokes a pipe in the garden).

Thankfully one of the best names in the Dutch OBI community Stijn came to the rescue and prevented this "faux pas" :

In English language names are written with a capital, but not in French. Changing français to Français is actually incorrect, because it means something different.
To be more clear: français means French and un Français means a Frenchmen. This explains why some language names are written without a capital.

A quick conference with the customer reviled that the issue was raised by a Dutchmen who thought the French branches would be offended if there language wasn't starting with a Capital.

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OBIEE Answers Tab Headings

Recently I had to do some C work of a MoSCoW list on a 10.3.3.3 system. The customer will probably wait till the 11g release to do any major changes. One of the problems in 10.3.3.3 is that some of the translation of the system messages are real "BabbleFish" (which means they made a translation using Google). Here is an example in Dutch:

It should simple read "Criteria" which means the same in Dutch as English. The text can be found in searchmessages.xml. Copy the file to your customMessages directory in your language directory.

Use a good XML Editor to change kmsgSheetCriteria to "Criteria":

Reboot the Presentation server:

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OBIEE Opaque data labels on charts

Recently I was asked how to get opaque (see trough) data labels on a chart:

This is control by the pcxml file belonging to the Graph type:

Open the file in an editor and look for the "DataLabels" tag. Edit the last to numbers (hex) of the BGColor subtag to "00"

(sync the file with the one in the OC4J if used). Restart everything.

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OBIEE 10341 First Impressions

New installation on windows 2003:

• The 100% "bug" is still there. (The setup screen goes to 100% while it still has 30 minutes of installation)

• They used the "old" sample sales instead of the extended: http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/01/obiee-sample-sales.html
• It's alive:

BI Publisher doesn't work out of the box:

(duh.... It's pointing to a non existing repository......) Still a bad out of the box example in my opinion.

Till Next Time

OBIEE 10.3.4.1 is out!

Start downloading:

From the release notes:

Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Version 10.1.3.4.1 contains no new features.
However, Oracle BI Publisher Version 10.1.3.4.1 contains new features. For more information about the new Oracle BI Publisher features, refer to the Oracle Business
Intelligence Publisher New Features Guide.

Release 10.1.3.4.1 of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition includes several new features for Oracle BI Publisher. These are outlined in the following list andexplained in detail in the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher New Features Guide:
■ Support for Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3
■ Extended Support for Single Sign-On Providers
■ Automatic Refresh of LDAP Cache
■ Support for Siebel CRM Security
■ Support for Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) for Burst Reports
■ Data Model Enhancements
■ Scheduler Support for JNDI Connection Pools
■ Support for Expressions to Calculate Date Parameters
■ RTF Template Enhancements
■ Remove Logos and Links from the BI Publisher Header
■ Disable Access to Guest Page for Unauthorized Users
■ Updates to the BI Publisher Web Service

The 10.1.3.4.1 release of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition introduces no new features for BI Office.

This download seems to be mainly intressting if you using BI-publisher or want to keep up to date with patches.

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OBIEE Dashboard Design 001

As promised in a previous article (http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/04/obiee-final-skills-creating-great.html) I will show you some tips and tricks on how the implement the findings of Stephen Few in OBIEE.

Let's start with a simple top 7 list of product revenue:

If we go to the the default chart we get:

Step 1 is to convert this to a horizontal barchart:

Step 2 convert to 2d rectangle effect:

Step 3: Remove the grid lines:

Step 4: Add a title and data labels:

Step 5: Set the axis title and labels:

Step 6: Remove the "chart box" by setting the Major Gridline colour the same as the background.

Step 7: Set the bar colour:

Let's compare both:

Still you have to consider if a simple list:

  doesn't give the user enough information, charts tend to take up more dashboard space and space is 'expensive'!.

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OBIEE The final skills, Creating great dashboards.

Most project we spend 70% on getting the data (ETL), 20% on creating the repository and 10% percent on creating the dashboards. Regarding step 1 and 2 most of us have enough skills do them successfully. The final step, creating the dashboard, is something we often take to light hearted.

Let's make a bold statement here: 60% percent of the dashboards we create, within six months, aren't used in the way we intended them or even worse aren't used at all.

Why? Most of them don't communicate to user in the most effective way. The user can't find what he is looking for at glance. Either we tend to overload him with data or present it in a non effective way.

If you want to master these last skills you should really read :

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few. (http://www.amazon.com/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167)

The current version of OBIEE has the (dis)advantage that it doesn't have many charting options. This means we have put in some extra toughts in the way we put the data on the dashboards.

In comming period I will post some examples how the findings of Stephen Few can be implemented within OBIEE.

Till Next Time

OBIEE Prompts putting the label in front part 2

In a previous article I showed you how to get from this:

to this:

based on an OTN entry from Stijn Gabriels.

But what if you only want this effect for 1 dashboard page or when you don't have easy access to the views.css?

Simple add a text frame to your dashboard page:

And set the content to:

<style type="text/css">
td.GFPFilter br { display:none; }
</style>

don't forget the "Contains HTML Markup" chechkbox.

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OBIEE Prompts putting the label in front

Or how to get from this:

to this:

It was a question raised on the OTN forum: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=886991

And to be quit honest I didn't think it was possible...

But Stijn Gabriels, one of the great OBIEE CSS gurus, came with a very elegant solution. Goto the views.css of the style you are using (S_ directory) and add

td.GFPFilter br { display:none; }

If you are using OC4J as webserver sync the files in the J2EE container.

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OBIEE Get the FireBug!

A tip I got from Christian: If you are playing around with CSS files get the FireBug for FireFox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/1843

It's a very handy tool to find which CSS class is controlling which part in your report.

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OBIEE Showing zero's in a bargraph

Somebody asked me how you can show zero's (0) in a bargraph. Have a look at this table:

If you put this in a normal barchart you get:

For product 13 and 14 it i'sn't clear if the data is missing (NULL) or is zero (0). One way of making it visible is this: Add an extra column which only shows the zero's (case when...):

(In the final report you can hide it)

Covert your chart to a bar/line type:

Sync the axis:

Supress the line and set the symbol:

Have a look at the results:

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OBIEE Multi lingual prompt

Recently I was asked to create a multilingual prompt label. Stijn Gabriels pointed me in the right direction.

First I created a dummy table in the .RPD with a single date column:

Next I put in the presentation catalog:

In my translation table I added the column and it's translations:

Based on this column I created a prompt with no label text:

Now in the dashboard it's available in Dutch:

In English:

In French:

You can use the presentation variable for your filtering.

Till Next Time

OBIEE Using SQL based scale makers

Recently on my question page I was asked to make a step by step example on how to use SQL based scale markes in a graph.

Let's start with a simple report based on the sample sales repository:

And put it in a vertical bar graph:

If we want to add a scale marker goto the axis scaling menu and press Edit Scale markers, press add:

Click on the edit button

Now the trick is to enter an SQL statement for which the first column gives back the value you want to use for your scale marker. In this case:

SELECT MIN("F1 Revenue"."1-01 Revenue (Sum All)" ) saw_0, "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_1 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_1

Do the same for the MAX marker:

SELECT MAX("F1 Revenue"."1-01 Revenue (Sum All)" ) saw_0, "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_1 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_1

Play around with the Marker caption, color en line width:

And have a look at the results:

Till Next Time