1. User's Guide
  2. Smart View and Oracle BI EE
  3. Working with Oracle BI EE Analyses, Views, and Dashboards
  4. Working with Prompts

Working with Prompts

Prompts enable users to specify criteria that determines the content of the view that they are inserting. Oracle Smart View for Office supports both prompts and page prompts. See also Working with Page Prompts for information on page prompts.

Prompts in Smart View are the equivalent of prompts in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Smart View only supports column prompts.

Prompts are defined at the analysis level in Oracle BI EE. Users are prompted to enter values for these prompts each time a view is inserted in Smart View.

If prompts are defined on an analysis in Oracle BI EE, then when you insert a table, pivot table, or graph view from the analysis into Smart View, you are prompted to select the data to be displayed for that view. When inserting a compound view from an analysis that has prompts defined, you are prompted to enter values only one time for all the views in that compound view.

For example, a prompt on Year is designated for an analysis, and the years 2010, 2011, and 2012 are available to choose from. When you insert a table, pivot table, or graph, you are prompted to select which year's data to display: 2010, 2011, or 2012. Or, you can choose to insert the compound view, and the prompt selection you make is applied to all the views inserted. After insertion, you can edit the prompts on each individual view to select another year's data to display.

Views can only be edited individually. The edit operation will prompt you for the values to be selected for each view that is being edited.

You may edit prompts in views that were inserted, or copied and pasted.

Note:

Prompts defined on hierarchical columns in Oracle BI EE are not supported in Smart View.

To edit prompts:

  1. From the worksheet, select a view:

    • Graph views—Select the graph.

    • Table and pivot table views—Select a cell in the table.

  2. From the Oracle BI EE ribbon, select the Edit Prompts button to display your original selections.

    Figure 28-9 Edit Prompts Button


    Edit Prompts button in the Oracle BI EE ribbon

    If the report definition has changed on the server, your selections are reset, and you must select all prompts and columns again.

  3. In the Prompt Selector, modify the prompt selections.

    Depending on how the prompt was set up in Oracle BI EE, you may be selecting data directly from a drop-down list on the Prompt Selector. You may also be picking values from the Value Selector dialog box.

    Note:

    In the Prompt Selector, there is a limit of 256 items that can be displayed in drop-down list controls or option lists. To display a higher number of items, increase the value of the setting in Prompts/MaxDropDownValues in instance.config in Oracle Business Intelligence Answers.

    The following is an example of a Value Selector, where the years 2008, 2009, and 2010 were selected for display.

    Figure 28-10 Value Selector Dialog Box Showing the Years 2008, 2009, and 2010 Selected


    Value Selector Dialog Box Showing the Years 2008, 2009, and 2010 Selected

    After you click OK in the Value Selector, the selections populate the first prompt in the example Prompt Selector (Figure 28-11). A second prompt in the example Prompt Selector requires that you directly enter an amount; in this example, the amount to display is Billed Quantity greater than $5,000.

    The completed Prompt Selector dialog then looks like Figure 28-11.

    Figure 28-11 Filled-In Prompt Selector


    A filled-in Prompt Selector dialog box. The years 2008, 2009, and 2010 are selected to be displayed, and all Billed Quantity amounts over $5,000.

    In some cases, the data to choose from can be exceedingly long. To accommodate loading large amounts of data in the Value Selector, Smart View presents values in groups. Scroll and make selections from the first group shown, then click More to view and make selections from the next group. Continue clicking More until you have viewed and made selections from the entire data list. Figure 28-12 shows an example.

    Figure 28-12 Value Selector Showing the More Option for Large Amounts of Data


    Value Selector showing the More button for working with large amounts of data.
  4. Click OK to close the Prompt Selector.

    After you make selections and click OK, the view is immediately refreshed and reflects your selections.

  5. Repeat this procedure to edit the prompts to change the output displayed.

Note:

  • Selection lists specified for prompts in BI Answers (radio button lists and check box lists) are converted to list controls in Smart View.

  • If a prompt is defined on double columns, and the prompt operator selected is * Prompt User, the following operators do not work at runtime:

    • is less than

    • is less than or equal to

    • is greater than

    • is greater than or equal to

    • is like

    • is not like

    To avoid this, do not use the * Prompt User operator. Instead, define the operator explicitly at design time, using one of the operators listed above. The operators will then work.

  • A date prompt that was created with user input set to text and the default value set to SQL that shows the current date results in the current_date SQL being shown in the prompt and not the actual current date.