Give your OBI EE Request the Stephen Few Treatment...

Stephen Few has a couple of great books on visual display of quantitative information. Use these principles when you're building your requests.

1. Take this...

From DR. OBI

2. Then turn it into this...

From DR. OBI

DB Functions 'Evaluate' and 'Evaluate Aggr' Bypass Cache

If super-fast performance using cache is your goal, the DB functions 'Evaluate' and 'Evaluate Aggr' will cause a request to bypass any OBI Server Cache. Look for an alternative that will populate your cache instead.

DR. OBI Open Letter Content Reminder

Dear Readers,

just a reminder of the ONLY content you'll find this blog:

• useful tips for getting the most from OBI EE front-end components
• descriptions are brief (you'll find a lot of wordy solutions out there!)
• a working knowledge of OBI EE is anticipated or
• at heart a desire to get more from your implementation
• references to fellow bloggers and colleagues highlight (in my opinion) good quality technical solutions or approaches

If you find the solutions helpful, I'm glad. To the best of my knowledge, blog posts do not repeat content found on other blogs!

All the best,

DR. OBI

Theory: Single Dashboard Prompt, Multiple Subject Areas

Frequently the requirment pops up to provide results from more than one subject area, using a single dashboard prompt.

From DR. OBI

OBI EE doesn't handle this situation directly, so the 'mid-request' concept can be used.

From DR. OBI

The steps briefly are...

1. Create dashboard prompt using subject area 1, including required columns.
2. Create a 2nd (mid) request listing columns and data returned from the prompt in Step 1.
3. Filter columns using 'Is Prompted' option. 
4. Create the 3rd and 4th requests, from subject areas 1 and 2 respectively, then make sure these requests are based on the results of the request in Step 2.

 A worked example in a future post...