Managing the Core Business Areas

This chapter tells you how to customize the core business areas and adapt them to your specific business needs.

This chapter covers the following topics:

Managing the Business Area

If you add new columns to seeded fact tables or add new tables, you need to manually add items for the new columns or create folders for the new tables using Discoverer Administration Edition. You can do the following:

Managing Security in the Seeded Business Area

This section describes how you should manage access to data through the standard security framework provided by Oracle Discoverer Administration. There are two security options available:

These two options let you manage data security at the Business Area level. The standard business area that is seeded with OFSA provides significant access to detailed data and therefore access to this business area should only be granted to system administrators and power users.

Creating New Business Areas To Limit Data Access

As an administrator for Discoverer, to provide access to a subset of the objects contained in the seeded business area or a subset of the data within the objects in the standard business area, you should create new business areas to manage objects and folders (data) in a way that meets your security requirements for a particular set of users. By creating a new business area and adding the appropriate folders, the administrator can grant access to these managed business areas to users as appropriate.

Consider adding conditions to folders if you need to limit the data available within a given table to a set of users. For example, the Discoverer Administrator might wish to limit access to customer account information by region. The company cost center organization dimension might contain this regional information through organization unit assignments. If the folder contains a condition that specifies specific Company Cost Center Organization IDs then users will only see data related to those specific ID’s. After populating the new business area with the appropriate objects and applying conditions as needed, the administrator can grant access to this business area to the appropriate user community.

Users that have access to a business area can create Discoverer Workbooks that run against the data contained in that business area only.

Managing Seeded Discoverer Workbooks

A set of seeded Discoverer Workbooks are built to run against the seeded business area. Access to these reports can be granted to users through the Oracle Discoverer Desktop or Discoverer Plus applications.

To grant Workbook access to specific users, select File > Manage Workbooks > Sharing.

If end users have access to the seeded business area, these reports will run out of the box. If users do not have access to the seeded business area, these reports will only run if users have access to a business area with all of the objects required by the seeded workbook. When opening a workbook that was built by a different user or from a different database, users will see the following message:

“This workbook was created in account xxxxx@xxxx.  You are currently connected to a different database account.  How do you want to proceed?”

Select “Open the workbook in the current database account.”

Using a Worksheet

Joins between fact folders and dimension member or dimension hierarchy folders use dimension member items. In addition to these joins, joins to FEM_DIS_LDGR_DIM_VS_MAP are needed to filter data by value set ID. Since Discoverer Workbook does not allow pulling data from all these folders due to join dependencies, workbook conditions using a worksheet are used to implement value set filtering.

The workbook condition uses a worksheet that is based on Dimension Value Set Map folder to create Value Set ID related joins between fact folders and the mapping folder, and dimension member or dimension hierarchy folders and the mapping folder.

Running Multiple Discoverer Releases on the Same Instance

If you need to configure the profile at site level, review the following table. You can still update profiles at user or responsibility level to point to the equivalent values for Discover 4i.

  1. Log on to Discoverer with the System Administrator responsibility.

  2. Navigate to the Profile > System window.

  3. Query the %Discoverer% profile options.

  4. Verify the following ICX profile options in Oracle Applications:

Profile Description Value
ICX_DISCOVERER_LAUNCHER URL that points to Discoverer Server Launch page http://<HTTP Server>:<Port>/discoverer/plus?Connect=[APPS_SECURE]
ICX_DISCOVERER_VIEWER_LAUNCHER URL that points to Discoverer Viewer Servlet http://<HTTP Server>:<Port>/discoverer/viewer?Connect=[APPS_SECURE]
ICX_DISCOVERER_RELEASE 1 digit number specifying the Discoverer release 10
ICX_DISCOVERER_USE_VIEWER Specify whether Discoverer Viewer should be launched instead of Discoverer Plus (default). Y | N
ICX_DEFAULT_EUL ICX: Discoverer End User Layer Schema Prefix
This is the EULprefix. The EULprefix in combination with the language code makse up the EUL owner at runtime. 
EUL
ICX_DISCOVERER_EUL_LANGUAGE ICX: Discoverer End User Layer Language Override
Since the End User Layer content is currently available in US English only, it is possible to override the user's general language preference for the Discoverer End User Layer using this profile option. The specified End User Layer language will be used regardless of the individual user's language preferences.
This profile does not affect the National Language Support parameters transferred to Discoverer. The Discoverer User Interface still appears according to the users ICX_LANGUAGE and ICX_TERRITORY profiles. The User Interface language will only changes for valid combinations of ICX_LANGUAGE and ICX_TERRITORY.
US
ICX_DISCOVERER_PARAMETERS ICX: Discoverer Parameters
This profile can be used to configure the Exit URL.
In addition, it can be used to optionally pass additional URL parameters to Discoverer.
exitURL=<E-Business Suite Home Page>
for example
exitURL=http://<HTTP Server>:<Port>/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?OAFunc=OAHOMEPAGE