11g Release 6 (11.1.6)
Part Number E20388-05
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Oracle® Fusion
Applications CRM Extensibility Guide 11g Release 6 (11.1.6) Part Number E20388-05 |
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This chapter contains the following:
Custom Subject Areas:Explained
Securing Custom Subject Areas: How It Works
Extension Dimension Reports: Explained
Publishing a Custom Subject Area: Explained
FAQs for Building Custom Subject Areas
A report subject area is a set of objects and fields that represent information about the areas of an organization's business. You select a report subject area from within the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Composer when building reports. Such reports display only those records that meet the criteria that is defined as part of the BI Composer report creation flow. To build reports, use either the predefined report subject areas that are delivered for an Oracle Fusion CRM application, or create new ones using a wizard. The report subject areas that you create using the wizard are called custom subject areas.
Review these aspects of custom subject areas, before you begin to create your own custom subject areas:
Creating custom subject areas
Editing custom subject areas
Using the available wizard, you create a custom subject area by selecting a primary object, related objects, and specific fields. When you later build a report within the BI Composer, the custom subject area that you choose as the basis for the report controls the data displayed on the report.
To access the custom subject area wizard:
Select Application Composer from the Navigator menu, under the Tools category.
On the main Overview page, select an application from the Application choice list.
Select the Custom Subject Areas link in the Common Setup pane, or in the local area of the main Overview page.
Considerations when creating custom subject areas:
Enter a meaningful label and description for the custom subject area. Subject areas usually have names that correspond to the type of information that they contain, such as service requests and orders.
The label identifies the subject area when building or running a report from within the BI Composer.
All custom subject areas that you create are based on a primary object. The primary object is the top-level reportable object that is the focus of the report that you eventually build using this subject area. If you want your report to include data from these objects, you can also select related objects. For example, quotes could be a primary object, and an opportunity could be a related object.
When selecting related objects for your custom subject area, consider the following points:
For a one-to-many primary-child relationship, you cannot add more than three child objects for a primary object.
For a many-to-one primary-child relationship, you can select only one child object.
For a reference relationship that a child object has with a primary object or any other object, you can select multiple child objects.
When you select the primary object and related objects, if any, you then add fields to the custom subject area and select the measures for those fields, as applicable.
Tip
You can either select measures for each currency, date, or numeric field individually, or select all such fields at once using the Actions list.
Use date leveling so that you can divide time periods into smaller units, for example, to view information by year or quarter and then by month.
Configure the security level that determines which BI duty roles can use the custom subject area for building and viewing reports using the BI Composer.
Review the graphical representation of the custom subject area including the objects, their fields, and the measures in the custom subject area.
Submit the custom subject area.
You can create and submit a custom subject area, either immediately, or save and close the custom subject area at any point and submit it later.
Note
You must first submit a custom subject area before you can select it from within BI Composer.
Once you save or submit a custom subject area, you cannot modify its primary object.
Using either the name, description, or primary object, you can search for an existing custom subject area and then modify it.
Note
You cannot modify a predefined report subject area that is delivered with an Oracle Fusion CRM application. Instead, create new custom subject areas to meet your reporting needs. Before you create a new custom subject area, be sure to review all the included subject areas to see if the one you want is already available.
Date leveling allows the user to view the data by different levels of time, for example, by year or quarter, and by month.
To configure date leveling, use the Configure Date Leveling step of the Wizard to either allow or disallow leveling. You may have to expand the field list in the Date field to select or clear the Date Leveling check box, as applicable.
Measures are a set of functions that you can apply on the date, numeric, or currency type fields of the selected primary or child objects while defining a custom subject area. Measures enable you to apply aggregation rules on the report data for a customized view using Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Composer.
Measures available to a particular type of field may differ depending on the field type. Use actions list to select or clear measures all at once for the applicable fields. Once you define a measure for the desired fields and publish a custom subject area, you can view and select these fields along with the applied measures when defining the report data in the Oracle Business Intelligence Composer.
Here are some measures you can apply to numeric, currency, or date type fields.
For numeric and currency fields, a measure can be:
Sum
Average
Count
Count Distinct
Maximum
Minimum
First
Last
Median
Standard Deviation Sample
Standard Deviation Population
For date fields, a measure can be:
Maximum
Minimum
For more information about selecting the data for a report using the Oracle Business Intelligence Composer, see Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).
You can select measures based on your reporting needs. For example, you can use measures to view product sales per store, state, or country. Or, to view the number of support tickets opened or closed per day, week, or month, and so on.
You can secure a custom subject area by granting or revoking access rights from role names, which determines which role names can or cannot access a custom subject area. You can also add more role names from a predefined list and assign or revoke permissions. This topic covers how you can add or delete role names, or grant or revoke access rights from those role names.
While defining a custom subject area using the wizard, you can use the actions list in the configure security step to manage role names and access rights as follows:
Select and add role names for a custom subject area from a predefined list of role names. This predefined list also provides the description for each role name. You can also select and add multiple role names from this predefined list using either the Shift or Ctrl keys. Once you add a new role name, you can select appropriate access for that role name.
Select and delete role names listed for a custom subject area. You can also select and delete multiple role names using either the Shift or Ctrl keys.
Note
You cannot delete the role name listed as everyone.
Read access is granted by default to each role name you add. If you want to revoke read access from a listed role name, select no access for that role name.
Note
You can create custom subject areas even for the objects in which you do not have access to the data, which allows you to build custom subject areas with compromising data security.
For key objects in CRM Applications, Oracle has provided a pre-seeded extension dimension that includes custom or extended attributes. This functionality enables users to create reports on extensions that are made to standard objects. Extension dimension attributes are not available for reporting until custom attributes have been specified. When expanding the Opportunity extension dimension, only the Opportunity type attribute is displayed.
When you create a custom field, you can create reports for the following data types:
Boolean
Number
Currency
Date
String
Percentage
Phone
DateTime
To create extension dimension reports, navigate to CRM Composer. In the Navigator menu, click Application Composer, and create custom fields for standard objects. Ensure that the custom fields are exposed on the UI, so that users can enter data for these new attributes. Then navigate to Oracle Business Intelligence Composer. In the Navigator menu, click Reports and Analytics, select a real-time or OTBI subject area that includes the pre-seeded extension dimension, and create a new report.
When you select report columns, you can see that the custom fields now show up under the extension dimension folder.
Publishing makes the data that you configured for a custom subject area available in the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Composer for building and viewing reports. Publishing processes begin when you submit a custom subject area in the last step of the custom subject area configuration wizard. This topic covers what happens when you submit a custom subject area for publishing, and what the publishing statuses indicate.
Once you submit a custom subject area for publishing, two processes occur in the background. First process is synchronous and creates Oracle Applications Development Framework (Oracle ADF) artifacts; hence, you must wait before the first process is over. The second process is asynchronous and creates centralized metadata repository (RPD) fragments and publishes them to the Oracle BI server.
Note
You must refresh the status to know whether the custom subject area is successfully published. You may have to refresh the status multiple times as the Oracle ADF and RPD artifacts creation may require longer time.
Once the status is changed to OK, which means that the custom subject area is published, you can go to Oracle BI Composer and create reports using the fields and functions that you configured for that subject area.
Publishing status for a custom subject area can be as follows:
Pending: When you save and close a custom subject area at any point before submitting. You can return to the pending custom subject area to complete the configuration process. This status may also indicate a failure in the background processes while creating Oracle ADF and RPD artifacts for a custom subject area.
In Process: When you submit a custom subject area, but the submitted data is in the process of being published to the Oracle BI.
Note
If the in process status does not change to OK even after multiple refresh attempts, there could be an error in publishing.
OK: When a custom subject area is successfully published and is available to the Oracle BI Composer for report configuration and analyses.
Note
You can edit a custom subject area in any status and resubmit.
For more information on using the Oracle BI Composer for creating and viewing a report, see Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).
The primary object is the focus of a custom subject area, which you can later select in Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Composer to build a report. The list of values for the primary object includes all top-level, reportable objects that belong to the application you selected to customize using the Oracle Fusion CRM Application Composer. The list of values does not include common component objects, such as notes, interactions, or tasks. Reportable objects are either top-level, custom objects or standard objects that have been configured to be reportable by the owning Oracle Fusion CRM application.
Note
Once you select the primary object and save the custom subject area, you cannot change the primary object.
No. Once you save a custom subject area, you cannot change its primary object; however, you can create a new custom subject area with a different primary object.
A child object is related to a primary or parent object and can be a primary or parent object of another child object. For example, an opportunity could be a parent object and its child objects could be an opportunity contact, opportunity reference, opportunity revenue, and so on. Such a relationship defines how objects in a database are related. While a primary object is the focus of the custom subject area, its related child object can be used to add further details to the report. Depending on whether the primary-child relationship is one-to-many or many-to-one, the permissible number of child objects that can be added to a primary object differ while defining a custom subject area.
A field is an object in the database that you can select for defining a custom subject area. The fields available for selection during the custom subject area task flow are determined based on the relationship between the primary and child objects.
You can edit a published custom subject area and then republish it once your changes are done. Modifying a custom subject area does not affect the reports that you created using that custom subject area before making the changes. You can use the modified custom subject area should you need to enhance existing reports.
Note
You cannot edit a primary object when you modify a custom subject area. Should you need to do so, create a new custom subject area using a different (new) primary object.
