6 Managing Metric Visibility

When using Retail Insights for reporting on your data, the main subject areas each contain more than 10,000 metrics and attributes. Many of these may not contain data in your environment and could be hidden from the Oracle Analytics interface to improve the user experience. Metric visibility is controlled using a data warehouse configuration table C_RPD_METRIC_VISIBILITY. The workflow required to make changes to this data is detailed below.

From your non-production environment:

  • Login to Innovation Workbench (AIF APEX) in your Non-Prod environment or navigate to it from Retail Home.
  • Query the table C_RPD_METRIC_VISIBILITY to review the data for metric visibility. By default, all metrics are visible (ACTIVE_FLG = Y).
  • Run SQL update statements to change the value of the ACTIVE_FLG column to N on rows that should be hidden from the UI.

The updates will not immediately reflect in the Oracle Analytics user interface due to server caching of the configurations. Updates are applied any time application patching or upgrades are performed, or if you request the updates to be applied manually by raising a Service Request to Oracle. For testing the changes immediately in your non-prod environment, open a service request for assistance.

When you are satisfied with the updates, perform the following steps to migrate the configurations to production:

  • Login to AI Foundation in your Non-Prod environment or navigate to it from Retail Home.
  • From the task menu, select the Control and Tactical Center > Manage System Configurations task. From the dropdown menu showing the list of configuration tables, select C_RPD_METRIC_VISIBILITY.
  • Export the table to Excel, keeping the default filename and data type (C_RPD_METRIC_VISIBILITY.csv). Do not modify the contents of the file, as the configuration import/export feature is strictly for migration of settings between environments.
  • Now go to the same screen in your Prod environment and select the C_RPD_METRIC_VISIBILITY table. Import the C_RPD_METRIC_VISIBILITY.csv file into the C_RPD_METRIC_VISIBILITY table using the Import button on the action bar.
  • If you need the configuration updates to be applied immediately, raise a new service request for assistance.

Once the updates are applied, the metrics having ACTIVE_FLG=N will no longer be shown to any user in the system when creating or viewing reports. You cannot add them to new data visualizations, publisher data models, or custom datasets. Existing objects that have hidden metrics may not return data properly until the hidden metrics are deleted from them. If you need to restore the visibility of a metric that was hidden by accident or cannot be hidden due to its use in existing objects, repeat the process above but change the ACTIVE_FLG back to Y, and then raise a new Oracle Service Request to apply the updates.