Some OBIEE Answers limitations

Even though, I believe that OBIEE Answers is a very fine piece of software, sometimes, I’m annoyed about certain OBIEE bugs and quirks.  Here’re some of my favorites (least favorite OBIEE Answers limitations).

1. You can not use prompts on a calculated column in answers.  Workaround: you can create this calculated column in the rpd in the business layer and than add that field to the presentation layer. This also adheres to best practices (put as many metrics as you can to Business Model Mapping layer).

2. When a prompt is created based on an SQL Condition (in “Show” “Sql Results” Option), if a filter is applied when this Prompt is used the condition created originally is lost. This is most likely an OBIEE bug and I’m not aware of any workarounds.

3. Inability to display the beginning date and the end-date in the report based on the operator “between”, because with this operator, you can’t define a presentation variable.In this case, the Between Date Prompt isn’t working properly and is a known OBIEE Answers bug. The workaround is to  create a second report. This will have the date column used by the report, only twice. For the first date column, change the column formula to min(date) and for the second date column change the column formula to max(date). Then use a narrative view something like ‘Report for period beginning @1 and ending @2′.

4. In Answers, when creating a filter, you sometimes see an incorrect behavior in the Edit Filter popup where the wrong values are loaded for a column. This behavior occurs when clicking the ‘All Choices’ link in the filter popup, for a column and then cancelling it. When you then navigate to another column to create a filter and select ‘All Choices’ you get the dropdown values for the previous column being loaded. No workaround, however, you can refresh the same filter again to get correct dropdown values.

5. Download Data and Download to Excel work differently. OBIEE is downloading all the columns present in Report Crieteria page of Answers part (even if they’re not included in the Dashboard). The workaround is to use Download to Excel.