Dashboard Design Tips

When designing a set of dashboards, I like to include an “at-a-glance” or summary page as the first dashboard a user sees when they log on each day. This page should include a condensed version of the user’s key performance indicators as well as any generated alerts. Users should then have the option of drilling down or to additional detailed reporting. In order to encourage usage of the dashboards, embed your dashboards as a link within the corporate portal so users have one click access to the information

Consider the page placement of your key performing metrics based on web page eye movement. The diagram below shows how the human eye views a web page, based on level of priority. Place the most important elements for viewing in the upper left hand corner and the least important in the lower right corner to mimic the way the eye scans a page.

Some additional design guidelines are:

• Ideally, the dashboard should fit on one page. Try to avoid any scrolling from left to right.
  

• The best screen size for the dashboard window is 1024 x 768.

• The ability to drill is critical to the success of your dashboards. Users need to know that the underlying data is going to be available to them. Some projects I’ve worked on have been very successful when allowing the users to drill not only to the detailed data but also back to the source transactional systems.

• Introduce competition by using Top 10 reports, conditional formatting, etc.

• Avoid decorative dashboard elements cluttering the screen like dials, gauges, excessive colors and images. Your dashboard can still be visually interesting while following standards.

• Speaking of standards, it’s important that dashboard standards and best practices be defined early in the design process. This ensures consistency among various groups within your organization. I recently worked on a project where OBIEE had been in place for over a year, being used by a few departments. Additional teams were being brought on board and new development had already started. There were no design guidelines in place and the new dashboards were completely different among each of the teams. One of our exercises was to look at what was in production today and identify standards to be used in future development. This also caused a little rework on the production dashboards to meet the requirements of all teams, resulting in a consistent approach for the organization as a whole.

As a little bonus, I’ve included a few tips from Dashboard expert Stephen Few:

Characteristics of A Well-Designed Dashboard

• Exceptionally Well Organized

• Condensed, Primarily in the form or Summaries and Exceptions

• Specific to and Customized for the Dashboard’s Audience and Objectives

• Displayed Using Concise and Other Small Media that Communicates the Data and Its Messages in the Clearest and Most Direct Way Possible

Common Mistakes in Dashboard Design

• Exceeding the Boundaries of a Single Screen

• Supplying Inadequate Context for the Data

• Displaying Excessive Detail or Precision

• Arranging the Data Poorly

• Highlighting Important Data Ineffectively or Not at All

• Cluttering the Display with Useless Decoration

• Misusing or Overusing Color

• Designing an Unattractive Visual Display

OBIEE Date Expressions Reference

During a recent project I had several requirements that involved converting dates to the first or last day of the current month, past month, future month etc. Thanks to that project I’ve become proficient at Date manipulations and thought I would share some of the expressions I had to use on the project and how they worked. For people who have not worked a lot with OBIEE Date manipulation this may come in handy since OBIEE does not offer built in functions like Oracle which has the LAST_DAY function to return the last day of a given month.

Any date manipulation within OBIEE will utilize the TIMESTAMPADD function. For the examples shown in the table below I used CURRENT_DATE as the starting point for all dates. You can replace CURRENT_DATE with whatever valid Date type you need as a starting point or can CAST a CHAR value to a Date type if needed.

The table below describes what is being calculated, the expression to perform the calculation, and then an explanation that explains how the expression arrives at the desired date value.

Date Calculation	OBIEE Expression	Explanation
First Day of the Previous Year	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_YEAR , -1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , EXTRACT( DAY_OF_YEAR FROM CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the current year. The second TIMESTAMPADD removes a year from the returned date for the First Day of the Previous Year.
First Day of the Current Year	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , EXTRACT( DAY_OF_YEAR FROM CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)	This calculation returns the first day of the year by deducting one less than the total number of days in the year.
First Day of the Next Year	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_YEAR , 1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , EXTRACT( DAY_OF_YEAR FROM CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the current year. The second TIMESTAMPADD adds a year to the date returned which will give the first day of the next year.
First Day of the Previous Month	TIMESTAMPADD(SQL_TSI_MONTH, -1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAYOFMONTH( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the Current Month. The second TIMESTAMPADD then subtracts one month from the first day of the Current Month arriving to the First Day of the previous month.
First Day of the Current Month	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAYOFMONTH( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)	This expression gets the current day of the month and subtracts one less than the current day to arrive at the first day of the month.
First Day of the Next Month	TIMESTAMPADD(SQL_TSI_MONTH, 1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAYOFMONTH( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the Current Month. The second TIMESTAMPADD then adds one month from the first day of the Current Month arriving to the First Day of the next month.
First Day of Current Quarter	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAY_OF_QUARTER( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)	This was included to show the calculations discussed above can be used with other functions. This is the same expression as the one that returns the first day of the current month except this one uses the DAY_OF_QUARTER property to return the first day of the current quarter.
Last Day of the Previous Month	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -(1), TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAYOFMONTH( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the Current Month. The second TIMESTAMPADD subtracts a month to arrive at the first day of the previous month.
Last Day of Current Month	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -(1), TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_MONTH , 1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAYOFMONTH( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD finds the first day of the current Month. The second TIMESTAMPADD adds one month to the date to arrive at the first day of the next month. The final TIMESTAMPADD subtracts one day from the returned date to arrive at the last day of the Current Month.
Last Day of the Next Month	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -(1), TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_MONTH , 2, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAYOFMONTH( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD finds the first day of the current Month. The second TIMESTAMPADD adds two months to the date to arrive at the first day of month after next. The final TIMESTAMPADD subtracts one day from the returned date to arrive at the last day of the Next Month.
Last Day of Previous Year	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , EXTRACT( DAY_OF_YEAR FROM CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the current year. The second TIMESTAMPADD subtracts one day to arrive at December 31st of the previous year.
Last Day of Current Year	TIMESTAMPADD(SQL_TSI_YEAR, 1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , EXTRACT( DAY_OF_YEAR FROM CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the current year. The second TIMESTAMPADD deducts one day to arrive at December 31 of the previous year. The third TIMESTAMPADD adds a single year to the date to arrive at December 31 of the Current Year.
Last Day of the Next Year	TIMESTAMPADD(SQL_TSI_YEAR, 2, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , EXTRACT( DAY_OF_YEAR FROM CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)))	From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the current year. The second TIMESTAMPADD deducts one day to arrive at December 31 of the previous year. The third TIMESTAMPADD adds 2 years to the date to arrive at December 31 of the Next Year.
Last Day of Current Quarter	TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -(1), TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_QUARTER , 1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAY_OF_QUARTER( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE)))	Demonstrated using Quarters. From right to left the first TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the Current Quarter. The second TIMESTAMPADD returns the first day of the next quarter. The final TIMESTAMPADD subtracts a single day from the date to arrive at the last day of the Current Quarter.
Number of days between First Day of Year and Last Day of Current Month	TIMESTAMPDIFF(SQL_TSI_DAY, CAST('2010/01/01 00:00:00' AS DATE), TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , -(1), TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_MONTH , 1, TIMESTAMPADD( SQL_TSI_DAY , DAYOFMONTH( CURRENT_DATE) * -(1) + 1, CURRENT_DATE))))	For simplicity I hard coded the January 1, 2010 date and CAST it to a date. I could have used the First Day of the Current Year calculation but didn’t want to over clutter the example. The second part of the TIMESTAMPDIFF uses Last Day of the Current Month calculation to force the TIMESTAMPDIFF to calculate the number of days between the first day of the year and the last day of the current month.

OBI Tips & Tricks: recover a forgotten oc4jadmin password

Have you ever made the mistake of forgetting your OC4J administrative password when installing OBIEE? It's happened to many of us and here is a great solution originally from David Kwan that can help you reset your password in a few minutes. I can't claim this as my own but have used this several times to help clients recover from any non-documented installs of OBIEE on their servers.

So here's the secret from Oracle Technical Support to reset it.

Please use following steps to reset your password:

1. Navigate to the <oc4j_root>/j2ee/home/config directory
2. Backup the file: system-jazn-data.xml for restore or later reference
3. Edit the file: system-jazn-data.xml
Locate the following entries:

<user>
<name>oc4jadmin</name>
<display-name>OC4J Administrator</display-name>
<description>OC4J Administrator</description>
<credentials>{903} MMGWnYKcnMKBBOR1LroHHrQpy3zmVbGEohN4aUSjxK4=</credentials>
</user>

and add the XML attribute deactivated="true", as shown below:

<user deactivated="true">
<name>oc4jadmin</name>
<display-name>OC4J Administrator</display-name>
<description>OC4J Administrator</description>
<credentials>{903} MMGWnYKcnMKBBOR1LroHHrQpy3zmVbGEohN4aUSjxK4=</credentials>
</user>

When you next start the oc4j instance using "oc4j -start" the container will re-prompt you for the password and add the newly encrypted password to the <credentials> tag in the oc4jadmin entry.