Friday, February 1, 2013

OBIEE - How to prevent automatic execution of reports in dashbaord

The ability to disable auto execution of reports is missing in BI. Neither it is not available in OBIEE 10g, nor in OBIEE 11g (up to 11.1.1.6.7 version). Some experts are saying its planned to be available in OBIEE 11.1.1.7 version. Going by number and speed of releases at one release a month, with currently 11.1.1.6.7, we should expect release of 11.1.1.7 within three month, i.e. May 2013.

In the mean time, here are few work around, if this cannot absolutely wait, or you don't plan to upgrade to new version in this time frame:

1. Use Prompts tab in Answers to create a prompt on a field. When this report is run on the dashboard, it will wait for the prompt to be selected, before execution will start. It may be difficult to integrate this with existing dashboard prompts though.

2. Another method is to default dashboard prompt to a dummy value, something like 'Select Month' etc, which will fetch 'No Results' unless users select an actual month. But this makes a prompt to be selected mandatory, and cant be left blank.

3. Last option that I can think of is to create an empty dashboard with just prompts and a basic answers report with out put as text field only. Ask users to select prompt values here, and make available a navigation link to actual dashboard. This way the values can pass either if the prompt has a scope set to "Dashboard", or through "guided navigation", as long as target dashboard has same set of filters.

Good luck.

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