Chapter 1. Advanced Hyperion Interactive Reporting Techniques

Welcome to the Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting 11 Expert Guide! Interactive Reporting is an extremely robust and powerful business intelligence tool providing ad-hoc querying and analysis, dashboards, and reporting capabilities. This Expert Guide picks up where The Business Analyst's Guide to Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting 11 left off, with a focus on providing knowledge of the expert features of the product. While the Business Analyst's Guide was an introduction to using the product for the novice to intermediate user, this guide focuses on evolving software users into experts. Interactive Reporting provides many flexible and advanced features that are commonly unknown to the typical business user. One of the most important lesser known features of the software is that it exposes the developer features of the product to the everyday user. These developer features allow the user to leverage scripting in common exercises, to build custom interfaces, and to use code to drive automation. While these features may seem complicated to a user of the product, these features can easily be learned and implemented after reading this book.

This chapter will start with an introduction to the book, highlighting the different groups of content that will be discussed. After the book introduction, the following content is a brief review of some of the main features of Interactive Reporting. The purpose of this review is to baseline terminology that will be used throughout the book and to orient the user to the sections of Interactive Reporting where custom scripting and advanced features are utilized.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• An introduction to the Expert Guide

• A review of the EPM Workspace

• A review of Interactive Reporting sections

• Leveraging code throughout the software

• An overview of the Scripting Interface

Introduction to the Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting 11 Expert Guide

Interactive Reporting provides users with a significant amount of flexibility in creating dashboards, reports, and analyzing data including the ability to leverage custom programming throughout the document. With this custom programming functionality comes complexity, where users need to understand the best practices in both the software and using JavaScript to create dashboards or custom calculations. This book focuses on providing the reader with an understanding and examples of where custom coding and features of Interactive Reporting can be leveraged to enhance the use of the product in daily activity. These features include introducing JavaScript programming concepts, creating simple to complex dashboards, analyzing content using built-in and JavaScript functions, creating briefing slides and batch exports, building a central code repository for use in the enterprise, and using the developer tools for optimizing and merging two or more Interactive Reporting documents together.

Review of Interactive Reporting concepts

The book begins with a review of the Interactive Reporting sections and highlights the use of Computed Items across each of the sections of the document software. The introduction provides a high-level understanding of the steps needed to perform computations in each section and provides insight into the differences in the sections. The Script Editor is also introduced, and an overview is provided on the features of the editor and the steps to add JavaScript code to dashboard objects and the overall document. This first chapter lays the framework for the book and provides a solid understanding for the content presented across the rest the book.

An Introduction to JavaScript in Interactive Reporting

The book transitions from the overview of the different sections of the product to an introduction to the syntax, methods, and features of JavaScript in Interactive Reporting. JavaScript is an object-oriented scripting language that is commonly used in web development to provide enhanced user interfaces. Within Interactive Reporting, JavaScript is used across all sections of the document, except for the Query section, to perform custom computations and to add interactivity. A solid understanding of JavaScript is needed to become an advanced user of the Interactive Reporting software. The fundamentals described in the second chapter and utilized throughout the rest of the book will provide the user with the confidence needed to build and leverage JavaScript in daily interaction with the software.

Building simple to advanced dashboards

Dashboard sections in Interactive Reporting are used for many purposes, from creating dashboard views of information, to using controls and objects on a dashboard to drive and orchestrate behaviour across multiple sections. This book places a large emphasis on building simple to complex dashboards and provides an understanding for managing code, filters, and interactivity across multiple dashboard sections in a single document. These dashboard chapters provide invaluable information for managing and reusing code inside a document, and the chapters demonstrate best practices for interacting with Interactive Reporting sections and components. Concepts learned in the dashboard chapters can be applied to any business situation where code is needed to perform an operation from processing queries to topics including creating custom programs that produce batch processing, using data from one query to filter another, and exporting to files.

Advanced computations

One of the key aspects of business intelligence is the ability for the user to analyze and manipulate content to answer a set of business questions. Many business users typically prefer to use Microsoft Excel to perform data analysis rather than Interactive Reporting due to their comfort with the software. While Microsoft Excel provides many excellent tools for performing data analysis, Interactive Reporting combines data analysis capabilities with the ability to filter, add computations, leverage data sets, and manipulate data in the millions of records.

Briefing slides and batch exports

Interactive Reporting provides many options for exporting information and formatted reports to different file formats. Users commonly struggle with the best and most appropriate method for creating data or formatted exports, with most users overlooking some of the most effective and efficient exporting methods. In addition to searching for the best export format, many users express interest in exporting information from Interactive Reporting into a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. While the Hyperion Smart View product can be used to refresh objects in Microsoft documents, another option is available using a few tricks in Interactive Reporting and does not require the use of an additional piece of software.

Another less commonly known feature in Interactive Reporting is the ability to add custom code to generate batch exports of deliverables. Leveraging a few simple programming statements allows the user to save significant time and effort when exporting multiple slices of information from the same document.

The Central Code Repository

One challenge that advanced users encounter with Interactive Reporting's report-centric model is the tracking and maintenance of heavily customized dashboard reports, especially in enterprise-level implementations where the code is used repetitively and transparently across multiple documents. Given the common and straightforward practice of storing similar JavaScript code within each document in an enterprise, it is incredibly difficult and infeasible to individually identify, track, and edit changes across documents.

One simple and invaluable methodology is to store report customization scripts in an accessible database table within the enterprise environment. The chapter on the Central Code Repository (CCR) describes building an external code library that allows code to be quickly pushed into some or all documents in an enterprise. This centralized repository provides the capability for agile responses to ongoing business changes and code maintenance without modifying the consuming reporting documents.

Optimizing and Merging

The Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting developer tool installation is packaged with two developer tools that are extremely beneficial to users of the software. The products are the Dashboard Studio and the Dashboard Studio Optimize Utility, which allow developers to merge, modify, and fix Interactive Reporting documents in addition to many other operations not included in the Studio developer utility or Interactive Reporting Web Client.