Adding Oracle BI Publisher Reports to Dashboard Pages

How Do Oracle BI Publisher Reports and Dashboard Pages Interact?

This section contains the following topics:

• "About Oracle BI Publisher and Dashboard Pages"

• "About Adding Reports to Dashboard Pages"

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 object's 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."

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.

The BI Publisher report can be either of the following:

• A BI Publisher report that receives its data from an Oracle BI EE analysis. For this report, you 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.

• A BI Publisher report that was created using a direct connection to a subject area. For more information on creating a report using a direct connection to a subject area, see "Creating Reports Using a Direct Connection to a Subject Area" in Report Designer's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher.

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:

   1. In the global header, click New, then Dashboard Prompt.

   2. Select either the subject area that includes the columns from the report or a subject area whose columns closely match those in the report.

   3. In the "Definition pane," click the New button, select Column Prompt, then select a column to use for the prompt. If the BI Publisher report was created using a direct connection to a subject area, make sure that you select the same column that you selected in the BI Publisher report.

   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 to/is 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.

   • If the BI Publisher report was created using a direct connection to a subject area, specify the value of the variable using the following format:

     "Subject Area Name"."Folder Name"."Column Name"
     

     For example:

     "Sample Sales Lite"."Time"."Per Name Year"
     

     If the column is in a nested folder, list all folders. For example:

     "Sample Sales Lite"."Time"."More Time Objects"."Day of Week"
     

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.