Is it possible to refer repository variables in filters of conditional formatting?
Solution
Can use presentation variables only for filters in conditional formatting as per the following bookshelf guide:
Oracle Business Intelligence Answers, Delivers, and Interactive Dashboards User Guide > Basics of Working with Requests in Oracle BI Answers > Using Variables to Display Values in Request Results, Dashboards and iBots
Turned out to be a bug.
Workaround using Bins:
Say you had a dollars measure column in your request. And you wanted to add a conditional formatting to set it to green if it was greater than or equal to repository variable repvar1:
- Create a duplicate column dollars in the request and name it dollars_duplicate.
- Set the column format for dollars_duplicate to hidden
- Set the custom heading for dollars_duplicate column formula to ‘dollars_duplicate’
- Create a bin e.g. ‘b1′ based on a filter condition where dollars_duplicate is >= repvar1 – Then go to your required column e.g. dollars and add conditional formatting based on dollars_duplicate column. And in the filter condition set it to the bin name ‘b1′ and specify the ‘edit format’ as green in colour.
You can similarly add all the required conditions as bin condition first and then reference the respective bin name for conditional formatting.
There’re a few well-written articles on about OBIEE caching configuration and strategies already. However, I’m posting a solution that I’ve found while investigating an unexpected behavior with tpl cache files disappearing for no reason (no updates in polling table, no manual purge, no BI services restart). Here’s the solution from Oracle:
The behavior was resolved when customer modified the refresh interval for the Repository variables that exist in their Repository.
When a dynamic repository variable is updated, cache is automatically purged. This is designed behavior. Cache will be invalidated (i.e. purged) whenever the initialization block that populates dynamic repository variable is refreshed. The reason that refreshing a variable purges cache is that if a variable was used in a calculation, and the variable changed, then cache would have invalid data. By purging cache when a variable changes, this problem is eliminated.
Since this is the designed functionality, Change Request 12-EOHPZ3 titled ‘Repository variable refresh purges cache’ exists on our database to address a product enhancement request. The workaround is to go through the dynamic repository variables and verify that the variables are being refreshed at the correct interval. If a variable needs to be refreshed daily, there may be a need to set up a cache seeding .bat file that runs after the dynamic variable has been updated. If the cache seeding .bat file runs prior to the refresh of the dynamic variable refresh, then the cache will be lost.
I think they should try to cover similar thing in OBIEE documentation.