Enhanced support for dynamic image display via URLs

Andrew Desalme-Oracle · June 2020

Description

Issue Summary

Provide enhanced support for displaying, embedding, and exporting images sourced externally through URLs that are exposed as attributes in an RPD or other dataset. Exporting a dashboard (OBIEE) or canvas (DV) should include embedded version of the images, obeying any sizing constraints set on the URL or <IMG> tag used to render it. The only way to accomplish this in OBIEE is through the use of HTML or the "Image URL" data format, which does not interact with most Export options and generally cannot be emailed as part of a larger report/dashboard in XLSX or PDF format. It also doesn't look like you can choose these options in DV for URLs passed in from the database.

Background

Our product is built as an RPD + Data Warehouse with OBIEE (now OAS). It is used primarily by retail businesses as their enterprise reporting and data solution in SaaS.

Use Case and Business Need

Business Need

As a retail business, images support many business activities such as Product Planning, Assortment Rationalization, and Market Analysis. The ability to show images in-line with analytics, and also export those views with the images embedded exactly as shown on screen, would be of significant benefit for certain industries (especially Fashion). The images in question are typically stored outside of Oracle's ecosystem in a web server or image repository, and shared with our solutions through a URL only. The images cannot be hosted within the Oracle solution as they are used for many purposes such as display on their websites and mobile applications. This assumes we have already configured OAS to allow the domain hosting the images.

Use Cases

Display in-line product images associated with "item master" data in numerous reports and analyses, such as:
- Top/Bottom Selling Item reports
- analytics on specific SKUs, colors, styles, fabrics, or other product differentiators
- analysis of products based on lifecycle (images of clearance items, images of newly introduced items, etc.)
Display images associated with any other dimension in a typical retail data warehouse, such as store locations, suppliers, invoices, receipts, employees, customers...
In all cases, images should display naturally on PC or mobile and resize to best fit the style of table or report having them included. e.g. a store manager that pulls a report on recently sold products (with images of the items) or a buyer that's shopping for new styles and needs to see what their current best sellers look like.
In all cases, the images are not just for display but also export to any supported format such as PDF or XLSX. The expectation is that the images will be embedded in-line with the rows or columns of data where the URL attribute is placed in a table or pivot. The embedded images should obey sizing constraints and ideally have server level compression to reduce output filesize.

More details

A couple of quick-and-dirty examples are attached for demonstration purposes. The request is not just to be able to make this kind of table in DV, but to have it be exportable and emailable using any format (PDF, XLSX, PPTX, etc.). Just showing the images on screen is not that useful by itself, as in many cases such reports are used offline (in meetings, on-site at a store or warehouse, sharing with executives, etc.). The need for offline access is also why the only supported format today (HTML) is not usable, as it does not fetch and embed the images from the URLs.

Original Idea Number: e0a16b6af4

Image Example - assortment analysis.JPG

RustyBruce-Oracle · October 2020

Having the ability to place images (PNG, JPG, etc) in a DV table or pivot is very beneficial from a visualization standpoint because it will help to quickly associate the data results with the item the data represents.

Samuel Linjer · August 2023

To be able to display images (URLs passed in from the RPD) in a DV table is a highly requested functionality from our business users. Today we use the ImageGalleryViz plugin, but it has limited functionality when it comes to sorting etc.