Hidden Dashboard Tips

We tend to get comfortable building OBIEE applications in a certain way.

If you have some free time, you might want to try out some of the options on the dashboard builder.

Guided Navigation in a Section and Arrange Horizontally may come in handy for instance.

There have been times when I felt that the dashboard editor allowed for too much whitespace between sections.

This got me thinking so I started exploring some options.

I had never used arrange horizontally so I thought I would give it a try.

Here is a sample of a dashboard with some embedded content and an OBIEE answers compound view in another section and column.

So if you take a look at the first column where we have the embedded URLs, you might want to slide out the video section and place it between the report and the Google search.

Notice how it swings the video right beside the embedded browser with very little whitespace.

This will certainly come in handy when formatting your dashboards for the widescreen monitors.

Next is the Guided Navigation choice at the section level. You can have entire dashboard sections appear and disappear depending on the results of an answers request. It works just like a Guided Navigation Link, only at the section level.

Take a look.

The following setting will SHOW the entire dashboard SECTION only if the request comes up empty. This allows you to show a section only when something is missing in the data. This technique can be used as an alerting mechanism.

Sometimes it pays off to explore options within the OBIEE suite if you can find a little extra time or if you are just plain curious ! I know there are some other handy little morsels splashed about in this software. If you find one, please share it with us.