3. Creating Presentations

Exercise Objectives

The purpose of this exercise is to show you how to create simple crosstabs and graphs using the Presentation Wizard.

Exercise Description

The goal of this exercise is to use the BI Wizards to create BI Presentation objects (crosstab and graph). These objects can then be shared and used in BI applications for reporting and analysis.

Exercise Tasks

To create a new crosstab:

  1. In the System-Navigator pane, right-click Project1BIDesigner1 and choose New Crosstab from the popup menu.
  2. On the Welcome page of the wizard, after reviewing the steps that are required to create a crosstab, choose Next to proceed.
  3. Notice that the Crosstab box is checked by default. Specify the presentation name, description, and search keywords that you want to associate with the crosstab as follows. The search keywords are used by the search tool to locate presentations as you will see later in the JSP tutorial.
  4. Choose Next to continue.
  5. The Available list displays all of the measures and dimensions that an end user may access and display in the crosstab. This list of measures and their organization into folders was specified by the database administrator when setting up Oracle9i OLAP. In this case, the tutorial database bibdemo schema has two folders: Financial data and Sales Performance data.
  6. From the File menu, choose Save All to save your work.

You should see the new crosstab in a Presentation Editor. Later you will learn how to customize this crosstab using the Presentation Editor. Notice that your new crosstab object has been added to the System-Navigator under the Project1BIDesigner1 object.

To create a graph:

  1. In the System-Navigator pane, right-click Project1BIDesigner1 and choose New Graph from the popup menu.
  2. On the Welcome page of the wizard, after reviewing the steps that are required to create a graph, choose Next to proceed.
  3. The graph box is checked by default. Specify the presentation name, description, and the search keywords that you want to associate with the graph as follows:
  4. Choose Next to continue.
  5. Now, select the same measure Sales to display in the graph:
  6. Specify the graph type. To experiment, select a major graph type that is listed on the left and review the extensive subtypes that appear in the pane on the right. Select Bar for graph type and subtype.
  7. Bypass the remaining steps for customizing the graph. Choose Finish.

You should see the new graph in a Presentation Editor. Later you will learn how to customize this graph using the Presentation Editor. The new graph object has been added to the System-Navigator under the Project1BIDesigner1 object.

From the File menu, choose Save All to save your work.

Exercise Summary

This exercise introduced wizards that enable you to define data-aware crosstabs and graphs. The definitions of these objects are stored in XML files and are accessible through the System-Navigator. Subsequent exercises will show you how to customize these objects. The next section looks at both modifying and analyzing your presentation objects using the Presentation Editor.

2. Creating Calculations | Overview | 4. Using QueryBuilder