Tuesday, September 18, 2012

OBIEE- Administration: Default Compound Layout

You may have come across scenarios where more than half of the reports in a project requires a particular layout based on business needs e.g. a report should always have a title and a graph. This is different than the default available in OBIEE which is title and table/pivot view. Suppose in a project you have hundreds of reports with similar layout which include a title, narrative, view selector, table and a chart- wouldn't it be productive to have these views created by default when you start creating a report? 

This can also be a great interview question where interviewer can get to know Administration/Customization/Configuration knowledge of the interviewee. An interviewee can also tell about this as a proactive step taken to increase productivity. 

To configure a default compound layout let’s create a custom xml message file called defaultcompound.xml and save it under the custom messages folder. 

Folder location-
{MW_Home}\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\web\msgdb\customMessages 

If you have not done any customization you have to create this folder under msgdb. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<WebMessageTables xmlns:sawm="com.siebel.analytics.web.messageSystem">
   <WebMessageTable system="Answers" table="ViewDefaults">
<WebMessage name="kuiCriteriaDefaultViewElements" translate="no"><HTML>
   <view signature="compoundView" >
      <cv signature="narrativeView" />
 <cv signature="viewSelector" />
      <cv signature="dvtchart" />
 <cv signature="tableView" />
   </view>
</HTML>
</WebMessage>
   </WebMessageTable>
</WebMessageTables>

Note that the views will be created in the same order as you define in your xml file.

Restart BI Services and start building reports with new default layout. You have reduced the task of creating multiple views in one single step making development many times efficient- in large projects this can even impact your budget and timelines. 

Hope it helps! 

Cheers! 
Deepak

For more information (or should I say less ;p)-
Configuring and Managing Analyses and Dashboards- 11g

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