OBIEE - Changing Columns headers dynamically - Article 2

http://total-bi.com/2011/03/obiee-dynamic-column-headings

OBIEE Dynamic Column Headings

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Paul McGarrick
Filed Under 10.x Answers, Answers, OBIEE 10, OBIEE 11g

A common requirement I come across is to create a report with dynamic column titles. For example a column should be labelled ‘Mar 11′ rather than Revenue and this should change each month with the data.

Easy you would think? Well sadly not as easy at it perhaps should be from an enterprise BI product.

So what are the options?

1. Venkat came up with a clumsy workaround a couple of years back but that involves casting all your columns to char. It never really felt like a proper way of doing it.

2. Use a session variable to dynamically set the column name in the presentation layer of the RPD. E.g.

3. Use a presentation variable as the column name.

This is probably the better of the techniques but it is still far from ideal. Simply edit the column properties and put the name as @{variable_name}{default_value}.

But we still have the problem of how to make this dynamic. Well, we can set a presentation variable using a dashboard prompt so we need to create a prompt and force it to a default value. Note that the prompt will need to be added to the dashboard but can be hidden by setting the CSS style to display:none on the dashboard section.

Let’s hope Oracle make this functionality a bit easier to achieve in a future release!

Bye for now.