OBIEE 11g Concepts (III) – How Do Inline and Dashboard Prompts Differ?

There are number of questions business users ask around OBIEE/OBIA implementations. Some of them are specific to functional stuff e.g.  #invoice on hold represents # hold invoices or # invoices items?  In addition some of the ambitious questions are around product features and basic product offerings e.g. what is difference between filter and selection steps?    How many different types of views OBIEE supports etc.

This blog series is an attempt to give a simple layman definition of number of concepts or OBIEE 11g terminology /offering. Prompts can be used to limit data for specific users; dashboard prompts can be used in several dashboards, and modified, with changes applying to all dashboards using the prompt, reducing cost of ownership. In this blog I am covering differences between Inline and Dashboard Prompts. The definitions are extracted from Oracle Standard Product documentation.

Inline and Dashboard Prompts

The two differences between inline prompts and dashboard prompts is where they are stored and their run-time behavior.

Inline Prompt

A prompt that is created at the analysis level is called an inline prompt because the prompt is embedded in the analysis and is not stored in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog and, therefore, cannot be added to other analyses.

Inline prompts allow the end users to specify the data values that determine the content of the analysis. An inline prompt can be columns prompt variable prompt, image prompt, or currency prompt. When you create an inline prompt, you select the columns and operators for the prompt and specify how the prompt is displayed to the users and how the users select the values. The user's choices determine the content of the analyses that are embedded in the dashboard. An inline prompt is an initial prompt, meaning that it only displays when the analysis is rendered. After the user selects the prompt value, the prompt fields disappear from the analysis and the only way for the user to select different prompt values is to re-run the analysis.

Dashboard Prompt

A prompt that is created at the dashboard level is called a dashboard prompt because the prompt is created outside of a specific dashboard and is stored in the catalog as an object, which can then be added to any dashboard or dashboard page that contains the columns that are specified in the prompt. Dashboard prompts allow the end users to specify the data values that determine the content of all of the analyses and scorecard objects contained on the dashboard. A dashboard prompt can be a column prompt, variable prompt, image prompt, or currency prompt. Dashboard prompts are reusable, because you can create one prompt and use it many times. When the prompt object is updated and saved, those updates are immediately displayed in all dashboards where the prompt is used. A dashboard prompt is a specific kind of filter that, when created, saved, and applied to a dashboard or dashboard pages, can filter all or some of the analyses and scorecard objects that are embedded in a dashboard or analyses and scorecard objects that are embedded on the same dashboard page.

A dashboard prompt is interactive and is always displayed on the dashboard page so that the user can prompt for different values without having to re-run the dashboard. Users can create and save dashboard prompts to either a private folder or to a shared folder.

Note:  For a dashboard using a column that was renamed in the Business Model, the existing dashboard prompts based on the renamed column do not work with newly created analyses. The workaround for this issue is to use Catalog Manager to rename the column in the catalog.

This blog series is an attempt to expand my blog reach to BI End User or Business Users along with BI Developers/Architects.