How To Change The Decimal Separator And/Or Thousands Separator in 11g

This blog is an attempt to share a Oracle Tech note to wider audience. 

How to change the decimal and thousand separator in OBIEE?

The thousands and decimal separators are defined based on your language settings under Settings/My Account/Locale.For example, if you select English it will use ',' as the thousands separator, but it you select Spanish it uses '.'.

Steps to follow to change the convention:

1. Make a backup copy of the localedefinitions.xml file in the BI_HOME\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\web\display directory.

2. Make a backup copy of this file (localedefinitions.xml).

3. Edit the file and search for  language code used in your system, i.e.
  <localeDefinition name="es">     <!-- spanish - base -->
 
in this section modify the following lines to contain the desired characters:

     <property name="decimalSeparator">,</property>
     <property name="thousandsSeparator">.</property>


Note that if you use a language code, such as:

<localeDefinition name="es-ve" basedOn="es"> 

<!-- spanish - venezuela -->

you will also need to modify the following parameter in this section too:
 

<property name="decimalSeparator">,</property>

The thousands Separator parameter is not shown in this section.

4. Save the file.

5. Stop and restart all of the BI Services

6. Clear the browser cache

7. Retest

I hope you find this shared information useful.

OBIEE 10g/11g Hierarchy Drill Down or/and Drill Through or/and Drill Chaining

OBIEE 10g supports level based hierarchy, with OBIEE 11g enhancements it supports level based as well as value based hierarchies with some additional configurations. The natural drill down is supported and can be configured to support drill through also. 

What id drill chaining? Does OBIEE support drill chaining?  Drill Chaining is a ability of analyze to jump from a level of one dimension hierarchy (product level in product hierarchy) to a level in another dimension hierarchy (Region level in Market hierarchy). This blog is an attempt to demonstrate on how to configure drill chaining and how it works in OBIEE 10g.  I don’t see any specific reason why it can be done in OBIEE 11g.

Drill Chaining Scenario

A scenario where user would like to start with a simple report for product and revenue, then jump from product level in product hierarchy to Region Level in Market dimensional hierarchy , and then, drilling down the whole Market hierarchy to jump to Manager level in Employee dimension and finally drill down to customer.

The analysis steps are as follows..

Define a simple query Product and Revenue from Sales Subject area

The result show revenue broken down by product

Click on any product and see jump from Product level in product hierarchy, to “Region Level” in Market dimensional hierarchy…

Then, drilling down the whole Market hierarchy to jump to Manager level in Employee dimension

Then from employee hierarchy, jumping to Customer, then orders details

Repository Configuration 

For Detailed Level in Product hierarchy, choose the tab “Preferred Drill Path”, and set “Total level” for “Market hierarchy” as next drill.

Similarly, for Detailed level in Market Hierarchy, choose tab “Preferred Drill Path”, and set  “Total level” for “Employee hierarchy” as defined as next drill….

These simple configurations in repository can set the drill chaining and achieve the result discussed earlier.