Best Practices for Working on Workflow Notifications
To configure workflow notifications, you use Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence features, specifically Oracle Analytics Publisher. Here are some recommendations, tips, and reminders for working with those features in the context of configurable notifications.
Know What You're Doing
Before you start configuring notifications, make sure you have plenty of experience with reports and data models in Analytics Publisher, along with the BI catalog. You should already be comfortable editing report layout templates.
Find the Data Model
If you don't know which data model a report is using, find the report in the catalog and click the Edit link. From there, you can see the name of the data model. Click the Select Data Model icon to see where the data model is at in the catalog.
Never Edit or Rename Predefined Objects in the BI Catalog
In the catalog, make sure that you don’t edit or rename anything predefined in the Shared folder. Here’s what you do instead.
- For reports and subtemplates, use the Customize option. This option is available
only if you sign in to the Analytics Publisher server directly, for example by
using
http://<hostname>.com:7001/xmlpserver. - To edit any predefined data model, copy and paste it into the Custom folder, and edit the copy.
Make Sure You Can Revert Your Changes
Before you start making changes, note down which layout is the default layout for the report. Also, download and keep the original .rtf file, just in case. For troubleshooting purposes, you might need to reproduce any issues using the predefined BI catalog objects.
- To go back to a predefined layout, you can select the predefined layout template as the default.
- To go back to using the predefined report or data model for notifications, just remove the custom report or data model from the Custom folder.
Use Predefined Styles
A predefined style template will apply to any layout template that you're editing. So, don't make a copy of this style template and try to apply an edited copy to your notifications. You also should not change the styles in Word when working on your notifications.
Test Your Layout Changes
Preview your layout template changes to make sure that everything is fine before you upload your .rtf file to the catalog. You can preview from Word without uploading to the catalog and simulating an approval cycle.
Also, when you use the Customize option to edit a predefined report, your changes won't be reflected until a refresh that happens every 24 hours. So, before you work on reports, create and set a profile option that determines the refresh interval. That way you can test the changes you save in the catalog sooner, instead of waiting for the 24-hour refresh.