2. Handling Multiple Presentations
Exercise Objectives
The objective of this exercise is to learn the basic concepts and tools for
adding more analytical capabilities to the simple application.
Exercise Description
Creating multiple presentations on one report facilitates the comparison of key business
indicators. BI Beans provides APIs for manipulating the data
source of presentations so that you can link a crosstab to a graph to provide
detailed information. These linked presentations give users a quick glimpse of how sales change
with time across different regions on a graph while showing the exact figures
in a crosstab.
Exercise Tasks
Add a crosstab
To open the Presentation tag wizard
Display a crosstab below the graph in the simple application.
- In the Code Editor, place the cursor above the line that contains the
<%--
The InsertHiddenFields tag adds state fields to the parent form tag --%>
comment.
- In the Component Palette pane, under Business Intelligence Tags,
select the Presentation icon to add the tag.
To use the Presentation tag wizard
In the Presentation wizard, you can define the attribute
values for the Presentation (Crosstab) tag.
- In the id box, enter
simpleCrosstab
.
- Click in the location box.
- To browse for existing presentations, choose the button that appears to the
right of the location box.
- Select Sales Analysis Crosstab, which is the crosstab that
you created in the previous tutorial, and choose OK.
- Do not enter values in the remaining attributes.
- Choose Finish to create the tag.
To review the generated Presentation tag code
The Code Editor shows the code that is generated by the Presentation wizard.
The following code identifies the crosstab definition file to use for the JSP.
<orabi:Presentation id="simpleCrosstab" location="Sales Analysis Crosstab"
/>
The following code displays the crosstab after the graph:
....................
<orabi:Render targetId="simpleCrosstab" parentForm="BIForm"
/>
....................
From the File menu, choose Save All to save the JSP application.
Run the application
You now have two presentations in the same BI application.
It is time to run the application.
To display the two presentations
- In the System-Navigator pane, right-click simpleJSP.jsp
and choose Run then simpleJSP.jsp.
A new browser window opens and displays the simple application with a graph
and a crosstab.
- Change dimension values for each of the presentations, and you will notice
that these presentations have independent data sources. However, users generally
want to see presentations with the same data source, where one presentation
shows the summary and the other presentation shows the details. This can be
accomplished by linking the presentations to a single data source.
- Return to JDeveloper.
- From the Run menu, choose Terminate then Embedded
OC4J Server to stop the application.
Link the crosstab to the graph
To link the crosstab to the graph
- Copy and paste the following line of code above the line that contains the
</orabi:BIThinSession>
tag:
<% simpleCrosstab.getModel().setDataSource(simpleGraph.getModel().getDataSource());
%>
This line of code specifies that the same data source will be used for
the crosstab and the graph.
- From the File menu, choose Save All to save the JSP application.
Run the application again
Because you have linked the two presentations, you should see different results
when the application runs.
To show the linked presentations
- In the System-Navigator pane, right-click simpleJSP.jsp
and choose Run, then simpleJSP.jsp.
A new browser window opens and displays the simple JSP application with a
graph and a crosstab. Now, the contents of the crosstab are similar to the
contents of the graph.
- Change the year of the graph to 2001 and the
contents of the crosstab change accordingly. Drill down China
on the crosstab and the contents of the graph change accordingly.
- Return to JDeveloper.
- From the Run menu, choose Terminate, then Embedded
OC4J Server to stop the application.
Allow presentations to handle more than 25 dimension members in page control
boxes (Optional)
The Find Members dialog allows users to select specific members
of a dimension when they choose More... from the page control
box of a thin presentation where there are more than 25 members. If you do not
provide this dialog for a presentation, then only a maximum of 25 members is
displayed in the page control box and users cannot select additional members.
To create a Find Member dialog
- Based on the directions in the Creating
a Simple BI JSP Application exercise, create a new empty page for your
JSP application. Use
findMemberJSP.jsp
as the filename.
- Add a BIThinSession JSP tag with id
simpleApp
and the same connection configuration file /Project1BIConfig1.xml
.
- Add a FindMember JSP tag with id
findMember
.
- From the File menu, choose Save All to save
the JSP application.
To reference the Find Member dialog
- Open simpleJSP.jsp in the code editor. Add the following attributes to the
presentations tag:
findMemberPage="findMemberJSP.jsp" findMemberId="findMember"
such that the presentation declaration tags are similar to these:
<orabi:Presentation id="simpleGraph" location="Sales
Analysis Graph" findMemberPage="findMemberJSP.jsp" findMemberId="findMember"
/>
<orabi:Presentation id="simpleCrosstab"
location="Sales
Analysis Crosstab" findMemberPage="findMemberJSP.jsp" findMemberId="findMember"
/>
- From the File menu, choose Save All to save
the JSP application.
Now, if the dimension members exceed 25, the page control box will have a More...
option at the bottom of the list for the user to launch the Find Member dialog
to select the appropriate member.
Exercise Summary
You added more analytic capability to the simple application by displaying
multiple independent presentations on a single JSP. You also demonstrated how
easy it is to link presentations so that they share the same data source, and
to allow presentations to handle long list of dimension members in their page
control boxes.
Best of all, you accomplished these tasks with minimal coding.
The next two exercises will add custom properties to the presentations.
1. Creating a Simple BI JSP
Application | Overview
| 3. Customizing Graph Properties