OBIEE 11.1.1.7.1 Bugs fixed / to be fixed now or 11.1.1.9 or 12c

I am going to go through a few important SR’s I have raised in the past few months and majority will have enhancements made by Oracle.

The reason why I’m writing this is because I’m hoping other could avoid these bugs if they come across it.

UNABLE TO SHOW TEXT MEASURES IN OBIEE FROM ESSBASE DATASOURCE

I would like to first give an update from my previous blog on Creating Text Entry in Essbase when I said there’s a bug when trying to read text entries from OBIEE. Recently, Dev team replied to have this fixed in 11.1.1.9 which is coming soon. However, there will be a three restrictions as follows (notice it says 11.1.1.8, this should be 11.1.1.9) (Bug 17515163):

RELEASE NOTES:
  
This trans contains essbase text measure support feature. There are following three restrictions.
1)Essbase text measure member can only be defined on Measure dimension.
2)User need to manually mark the varchar data type in rpd physical layer for text measure.
3)The text measure can be supported only for flat cube model.

I would understand that the text member will need to be defined on a Measure dimension but point 2 and 3 doesn’t really make sense. This means a manual edit will be needed to mark as varchar data type. Moreover, flattening a cube isn’t a best practice. I guess we’ll have to make another suggestion to Oracle.

Globally Change Answer Print Paper Size

As you may know, in Answer, there is a “Print Option” and within you can set Paper Size and Orientations. Currently, there are not Global Settings for this which means you will need to do this setup manually by Answer Report. This might not be a problem in the States but in Asia where default Paper Size is not US Letter, this causes a lot of tedious extra effort.

An enhancement request has been made: ER# 19776902 and hopefully there is a way to globally change the default paper size instead of going through each individual Answer Report.

Export to Excel with Custom Percentage

When you set a custom percentage in Answer similar to this screenshot, you will have problems exporting to Excel 2003. If Dashboard shows 50% for example, exporting to Excel 2003 will show 0.5% and Excel 2007+ will show 50% which is correct.

A hot fix has been provided if you ever encounter this. Apply Patch 19925935: MERGE REQUEST ON TOP OF BI BP 11.1.1.7.140715 FOR BUGS 16800696 18601947 on the top of OBI EE 11.1.1.7.140715 Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit). This is available through Oracle Support Page. Please view the readme before applying the patch.

These issues are fixed in this hot fix patch.

  16800696: DASHBOARD ACTION MENU ITEMS ARE EXPORTED TO EXCEL/PDF AS TEXT
  18601947: PM: RESOLVE BASIC HTML IN VIEWS CONTAINING FMAP AND PAGENUMBER
  19129504: EXCEL EXPORT PROBLEM WITH CUSTOM DATA FORMAT - % DISPLAYED INCORRECTLY

Dashboard Section Borders

Whenever custom borders are used, they don’t react as expected. I will demonstrate how to replicate this issue and hopefully everyone using this version can avoid it for the time being. I have already logged an SR a few months ago but there are still no positive replies yet. I will update once there are official replies from Oracle Support.

Let’s go to Office Details for easy demonstration. Notice the boarders around the first prompts?

Edit the dashboard.

Edit section 1 and choose format section.

The default selection as follows:

Let’s modify the borders to the following:

Save the dashboard settings and view the results and you will find that all borders are missing for that section.

 

There are more bugs I have come across but as for now, these are all the critical ones. Feel free to contact me if you know any other critical bugs that you would like to share.