Using Action Links in OBIEE 11g

Oracle's OBIEE 11g now has the option to create an action link from an analysis, dashboard, KPI etc. which basically means you can add a link to direct the user elsewhere, within the OBI catalogue or to an external system or web page.  The beauty is in the magic, where you can set an action link against a column value and if the value is shown in a table or a chart, the table or chart will trigger the action link.

Further to directing a user to another dashboard page, you can use the action links to set value in Dashboard Prompts, improving the users experience as the prompts have effectively been set for them.  This blog post will demonstrate how these links can be set up.

Step 1

Build you criteria, and when you are happy with the results, you are ready to start adding an Action Link.

Step 2

From the criteria, select the drop down on the column, in this example "Total Sales Income".  Select "Column Properties".

Step 3

Navigate to the "Interaction" tab, you will notice you can add interactions to the column heading and to the value.  In this example we concentrate on the Value, however, the heading works in just the same way.

Click the + sign to add the action link.

Step 4

Enter some text in the "Link text", this will popup whenever the user clicks on the column value whether the presentation is in a table or chart.

Step 5

Choose the type of action link.  In this example we will choose "Navigate to a Web Page" as we are going to navigate to a page within our dashboards.

Step 6

Paste the URL in the "URL" box, including parameter settings if you have some i.e. values from prompts on the target page.  If you do have parameters to set, click the button "Define Parameters"

Step 7

If your URL has the parameter values set, you will notice OBIEE has broken the parameters up for you so you can tweak these as you see fit.  In this example, we will set the parameter for the "Region" dimension to be driven by a column value selected on the source page i.e. page hosting the answer with the action link.

Step 8

Select the button next to the dimension to be changed.

Step 9

Choose "Column Value"

Step 10

Select the column that contains the value you want to use.

Step 11

We are now set up, however the default options don't set the action link to be hidden, therefore when the use clicks it a box will appear with the value settings.  This is fine for testing, but in my opinion not a great user experience in these circumstances.

I set all of the parameters to hidden, therefore avoiding the action link confirmation box appearing when it's used.

There will be another blog post on how to set the URL and the parameter values.

Hope this has helped you.