1 Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile

This chapter describes Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile, an application for the Apple iPad. The chapter contains the following topics:

"What Can You Do with Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile?"
"Which BI Content is Viewable Using Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile?"
"Localization of BI Content"

What Can You Do with Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile?

Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile allows you to view and interact with Oracle BI content on the Apple iPad.

Using Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile, you can access and analyze all BI content such as analyses and dashboards, BI Publisher content, scorecard content, and content delivered by agents.

Viewing content on a mobile device requires a presentation that differs from how you view the same content on a desktop monitor. Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile optimizes the presentation of your BI content for the iPad.

You download Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile for Apple iPad from Apple's App Store. Use of the application requires that you have access to an instance of Oracle BI EE that is configured and running.

Note:

The Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile application for the iPhone behaves differently than the application documented in this guide. For documentation on the iPhone application, see the 11.1.1.5 version of Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

Figure 1-1 shows a simple dashboard on an iPad.

Figure 1-1 Oracle BI Mobile Dashboard on an iPad

Navigating the Oracle BI Mobile application is explained in "Navigating the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog and BI Content on Your iPad" and iPad touch gestures that are useful are listed in Appendix B, "Touch Gestures Used in Oracle BI Mobile."

Which BI Content is Viewable Using Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile?

All of your Oracle BI content is available for immediate consumption on your iPad. There is no need to move content to specially marked folders. Nor do you need to redesign any content specifically for viewing on the mobile devices.

Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile supports the following object types:

Dashboard
Analysis
Briefing books
BI Publisher report
Content delivered by agents
Scorecard

For all supported object types, Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile supports rendering of most report content, though content is sometimes altered to optimize for the mobile context. In analyses and dashboards, the Oracle BI Mobile application provides all analytic actions (such as drill, action link, prompts, and so on). For BI Publisher, the actions supported match those of the desktop (based on output type).

The Oracle BI Mobile application does not support rendering of RSS feeds or catalog views. External content or content that uses iFrame tags is not supported and is not guaranteed to be rendered correctly.

Localization of BI Content

You can use the Device Locale setting to determine how BI content is rendered on the iPad. You can specify localization of BI content through the Oracle BI Presentation Services server (with Device Locale set to OFF) or through the iOS default (Device Locale set to ON).

Localization of the application shell (that is, the Home page, the toolbar, and so on) is always controlled by the iOS.

Note:

The standard behavior of Apple's mobile operating system requires that the application shell user interface be changed only through the Apple iOS Settings application and not by the Oracle BI Mobile application. The Device Locale toggle in the Oracle BI Mobile application changes the language of the BI content, but not the application shell user interface.

Bi-Directional Text and the BI Mobile Client Shell User Interface

It is important to note, if you intend to use the Oracle BI Mobile application with a right-to-left language such as Hebrew or Arabic, the client shell user interface will not show the layout correctly.