OBIEE Blog

As far as I’m aware there’re no any OBIEE books published on paper (I know about one book in production by Mark Rittman, that got delayed to arrive along with OBIEE 11g release). As I wrote about it, I found one it’s “Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Dashboard & Report Best Practices” from BI consulting group (a respectable company to my opinion). Has anyone read it by any chance? It seems from table of contents and preview that it’s primarily targeted towards dashboard designers, report users and super users.

Something interesting I found while browsing OBIEE docs. This should be incredibly useful to force users select enough columns for the report.

How to not allow the execution of the request and show an appropriate error message to the user If request contains any of the following columns: (Sales Amount, Sales Amount With Tax, Ticket Count), and if request does not contain at least one of the columns (Date, Month, Year, Day of Week)

This is possible via the Blocking Requests Based on Formula functionality using a custom js file

This is explained in Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide > Administering Oracle BI Answers > Blocking Requests in Answers

To locate the documentation please navigate to OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/bi_doc.html
Then drill on “Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Documentation”
> View Library (for the required version) > Documentation tab > Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide

The documentation does not state where to place the js file.
*Using oc4j as the web server, you need to put the custom .js in “OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\applications\analytics\analytics\res\b_mozilla” in order for the fmap: reference in the CustomMessages xml file to find it (also need to bounce both OBIPS & oc4j).

*Using IIS, you need to put the .js file in “OracleBI\web\app\res\b_mozilla”, not “OracleBIData/web/res” as the doc states (and bounce OBIPS & WWW Pub Service).

Also, you can use a full network path reference for the src argument in the custom xml file – e.g.:

<script language=”javascript” src=”\\mylabmachine\OracleBIData\web\res\myblocking.js” />

That way, you can place the .js file anywhere – in this example in the “OracleBIData\web\res” folder, not “OracleBI\web\app\res\b_mozilla”.

I found an excellent post about OBIEE LDAP security for users the link to the topic is here: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=843503&tstart=15 and that discussion is pointing to this useful LDAP security configuration article on Mark Rittman and John Mead’s blog.

Due to my blogging slump, I’ve not realized that I’ve not been posting for weeks now. I promise – it’s going to be my New Year’s resolution to write more. Also, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who’s been active in providing great info about OBIEE. Not in any particular order: John Minkjan, Venkat, Jeff McQuigg, MarkRittman Jon Mead, Majendi, Kurt Wolff, Andy Cox and many others. Please keep doing excellent work. Please accept my greetings.

Another good one.

Symptoms

You are on OBI 10.1.3.3.3 and have configured a Dashboard Prompt with a couple of columns where the value selected by the user in the first prompt column gets stored in a presentation variable, and the values in the second prompt column depends on
the value in this presentation variable.

When both column prompts are defined as ‘Drop down’ type. The prompts work
fine. The second column correctly displays in the dropdown the values.

However when the second column prompt control is defined as ‘multi select’.

ACTUAL BEHAVIOR
———————–
No data is displayed in the prompt. The prompt displays ‘No Choices available’.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR
———————–
The multiselect prompt column should correctly display values in the prompt as it does when it is defined as a dropdown.

Cause

Statement describing the cause of the problem
This issue has been determined to be a bug, which is now reported in Change Request Bug No: 7571682 (MULTISELECT PROMPT AND PRESENTATION VARIABLE CAUSES ‘NO CHOICES AVAILABLE’).
The proof that this is the cause of the problem
This issue is caused by Bug No: 7571682 (MULTISELECT PROMPT AND PRESENTATION VARIABLE CAUSES ‘NO CHOICES AVAILABLE’) as per our inhouse testcase which replicated the same behavior your system exhibits.

Solution

This issue has been determined to be a bug, which is now reported in Change Request Bug No: 7571682 (MULTISELECT PROMPT AND PRESENTATION VARIABLE CAUSES ‘NO CHOICES AVAILABLE’).

As possible workarounds we have found that, on the Dashboard, when you click the ellipsis and invoke the multiselect popup and you get the message “No Choices Available.”,

1. Click the ‘Go’ button will bring back data

2. Alternatively you can enter a value in the match box and it returns data

3. Also you can consider using the vanilla constrain option for the dashboard prompts, so you can have column 2 constrained by column 1.

Please consider the above as possible workarounds.