About Custom Subject Areas

With your applications, you get prebuilt analytics that answer typical business questions you might have. But in case your questions aren't answered, you can create your own analytics using prebuilt subject areas.

If the prebuilt subject areas don't cover what you need, then you can create your own custom subject areas to use to create analytics that do answer your questions. This feature is especially useful as you work through the process of configuring your applications. For example, if you create custom objects and want to report on them, then you will need to create custom subject areas.

Subject Areas and Analytics

What's the relationship between subject areas and analytics?

A subject area is the starting point for building analytics. It's basically a collection of related information from your database. Analytics, meanwhile, are like snapshots of a subject area. They give you a focused view of that collection of information, so you can get more meaningful insights from your data.

You can look at a subject area like a painter's palette and the resulting analytics are the completed paintings that you create. The subject area contains all the colors you need to paint one or more pieces of artwork. And your finished artwork gives you the intelligence you need to better understand and operate your business.

When to Create Custom Subject Areas

Creating custom subject areas isn't required, and you do get prebuilt subject areas that contain a lot of information from which you can build your own custom analytics. You will need to create custom subject areas, however, for two reasons:

• If you create custom objects and want to report on them

• If the existing prebuilt subject areas don't contain the measures (facts) you need for reporting

How to Create and Use Custom Subject Areas

To create a custom subject area, you're guided through the process step by step, but here's a quick overview:

1. Navigate to Application Composer.

2. Click Custom Subject Areas on the Overview page of Application Composer.

3. Select Create from the Actions menu.

4. Complete the guided process.

Next, to actually build analytics from that subject area, use BI Composer. Using a custom subject area in BI Composer is the same as using a prebuilt subject area.

1. From the Navigator menu, select Tools > Reports and Analytics.

2. In the Contents pane, click Create.

3. Select the published custom subject area and start creating your analytic, such as a report or an online analysis.

Things to Remember

Before you start creating custom subject areas, you should know the following:

• Tools:

  • Use Application Composer to create custom subject areas. Then use BI Composer to create analytics based on those custom subject areas.

  • If you're using unified migration to migrate your configurations, then always create custom subject areas in the source environment, not the target environment. Otherwise your custom subject areas will be overwritten when you do the migration. And, when creating the migration set on the Migration page, remember to include Business Intelligence content so that your custom subject areas will be visible in both Analytics Answers and BI Composer.

• Objects: A subject area is always built around a business object. That object is the focus of any reporting created using that subject area. You can add related objects to a subject area, but there is always a primary object and you can't change it.

• Dates and numbers:

  • The real meaningful substance of any reporting is typically "how much" or "how many." You're measuring things to get insights into how well your business is doing. When creating a custom subject area, you can tag attributes of the custom subject area object as measures, which means you specify which date and number fields are measurable. You will use these measures when you later use this subject area to create analytics.

  • You can also enable date leveling, which means that you can group the data in your analytics by different calendar attributes. You do this by mapping a date attribute to a calendar object, like Week Of the Year, Month of the Year, or Enterprise Quarter. This mapping lets you view data in your analytics by a specific quarter or year, for example.

• Publishing: Once you create a custom subject area, you can't actually use it in BI Composer until you publish it.

In the next few topics, we will review some of these key concepts. We will then talk in more detail about how to create custom subject areas.