4-8 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
About Briefing Books and Printing BI Publisher Reports If you plan to print a dashboard page that contains a BI Publisher report or to include the page in a briefing book, then
you must keep the following points in mind:
■
If you print the briefing book as PDF and if the output format of the BI Publisher report is PDF, then the BI Publisher report is printed after the other objects on the
page. If you print a dashboard page that contains a BI Publisher report as PDF, but the dashboard page is not part of a briefing book, then the BI Publisher is not
printed.
■
If you print the dashboard page or briefing book as MHTML, then the BI Publisher report is not printed.
About Adding Reports to Dashboard Pages
You can add one or more existing reports to a dashboard page. The advantage is that you can share reports with other users and schedule the dashboard pages using
agents. An agent sends the entire dashboard to the user, including all data pages that the report references.
When configuring an agent for a dashboard page that contains a BI Publisher report, ensure that the following criteria are met:
■
The output format of the BI Publisher report must be PDF.
■
The agent must be set to deliver PDF. You can add reports to a dashboard page as embedded content and as a link.
Embedded means that the report is displayed directly on the dashboard page. The link opens the report in BI Publisher within Oracle BI EE.
If you modify the report in BI Publisher and save your changes, then refresh the dashboard page to see the modifications.
Adding Reports to Dashboard Pages
To add a report to a dashboard page: 1.
Edit the dashboard. For information, see Editing Dashboards
.
2.
Navigate to the page to which you want to add a report.
3.
Select a report in one of the following ways:
■
Select the report from the Catalog pane and drag and drop it into a section on the dashboard page.
■
To add a report from a dashboard page, select the report from the folder that contains its dashboard in the Catalog pane.
4.
Set the properties of the object. To do so, hover the mouse pointer over the object in the Page Layout area to display the objects toolbar, and click the Properties
button.
The BI Publisher Report Properties dialog
is displayed.
5.
Complete the fields in the properties dialog as appropriate.
6. Click OK.
7. Click Save.
8.
If required, add a prompt to the dashboard page to filter the results of an embedded parameterized report, as described in
Using Prompts with Parameterized Reports
.
Building and Using Dashboards 4-9
9.
Optionally, schedule the dashboard with an agent, as described in Chapter 8,
Delivering Content.
Using Prompts with Parameterized Reports
You can use prompts to filter the results of embedded parameterized BI Publisher reports to show only results that match the prompt criteria.
A BI Publisher report that receives its data from an Oracle BI EE analysis must have the report columns to filter on set to Is Prompted in the analysis. This type of report
supports the full range of prompt expressions.
To use prompts with parameterized reports: 1.
In BI Publisher, open the report and locate the parameters that it uses. Set a default value for each required parameter so that the report displays correctly without
user interaction.
2.
Create a new column prompt for each parameter by following these steps:
a. In the global header, click New, then Dashboard Prompt.
b.
Select either the subject area that includes the columns from the report or a subject area whose columns closely match those in the report.
c.
In the Definition pane
, click the New button, select Column Prompt, then
select a column to use for the prompt. For more information on creating prompts, see
Chapter 6, Prompting in Dashboards and Analyses.
3.
Complete the New Prompt: Column dialog
and click OK. Verify the following
settings:
■
Set the Operator field to is equal tois in.
■
Define a presentation variable with the exact same name as the parameter from the report. When using variable names in prompts, ensure that you spell
them correctly and adhere to case-sensitivity. Make the data type of the parameter match the data type of the column, if they are not based on the
same database column.
4. Click the Save Prompt toolbar button to save the prompt to the catalog in a shared
folder.
5.
Navigate to the dashboard that contains the parameterized report and click the Edit Dashboard
toolbar button. The
Dashboard builder is displayed.
6.
In the Catalog pane, navigate to the folder that contains the prompt to add.
7.
Drag and drop the prompt into the section on the dashboard page that contains the report.
8. Click the Save toolbar button.
Changing the Properties of a Dashboard and its Pages
You can change the properties of a dashboard and its pages. Specifically, you can:
■
Change the style and description of the dashboard
■
Add hidden named prompts to the dashboard and to its pages
4-10 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
■
Specify which links Analyze, Edit, Refresh, Print, Export, Add to Briefing Book, and Copy are to be included with analyses at the dashboard level. Note that you
can set these links at the dashboard page level and the analysis level, which override the links that you set at the dashboard level. For more information, see
Report Links dialog .
■
Rename, hide, reorder, set permissions for, and delete pages.
■
Specify which accounts can save shared customizations and which accounts can assign default customizations for pages, and set account permissions.
■
Specify whether the Add to Briefing Book option is to be included in the Page Options menu for pages.
To change the properties of a dashboard and its pages: 1.
Edit the dashboard. For information, see Editing Dashboards
.
2. Click the Tools toolbar button and select Dashboard Properties.
The Dashboard Properties dialog
is displayed.
3. Make the property changes that you want and click OK.
4. Click the Save toolbar button.
Changing the Properties of Objects Added to Dashboard Pages
You can change the properties of objects that have been added to a dashboard page from the
Dashboard Objects pane and from the
Catalog pane .
To change the properties of an object on a dashboard page: 1.
Edit the dashboard. For information, see Editing Dashboards
.
2.
Navigate to the page that contains the object.
3.
Hover the mouse pointer over the object in the Page Layout area to display the object’s toolbar and click the Properties button.
What is displayed depends on the type of object. For some objects, a properties dialog is displayed. For other objects, a menu of options is displayed. For more
information on the properties that you can change, see Properties Buttons for
Objects .
4.
Make the property changes that you want.
5. Click the Save toolbar button.
Deleting Objects on Dashboard Pages
If you add an object that you later decide that you do not want, then you can delete it. Keep the following points in mind when deleting objects:
■
When you delete an object that contains other objects, such as a column or section, you also delete all objects in that container.
■
When you delete a column, other columns on the page might resize automatically to maintain column alignment.
■
For objects that are saved in the catalog, the object is deleted from the dashboard page only. It is not deleted from the catalog. Users with the appropriate
permissions can edit the contents of the catalog. For information, see Chapter 13,
Managing Objects in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog.
Building and Using Dashboards 4-11
To delete an object on a dashboard page: 1.
Edit the dashboard. For information, see Editing Dashboards
.
2.
Navigate to the page that contains the object to delete.
