Using Data Actions to Set Parameter Values

Will Wertz

Organization Name (Required - If you are an Oracle Partner, please provide the organization you are logging the idea on behalf of):

Worthington Industries

Description (Required):

Data actions are powerful in the sense that they allow for a higher level of interaction and automatic report generation, but they lack functionality with parameters, which are also very powerful.

If a data action could be set to pass a value into a parameter (either from a related field or from a hard-set value), it would open the doors for features like minimal-click custom drilldowns without having a different canvas for every desired column combination or forcing the user to manually change several parameters every time they want to look at something different. It would also allow for buttons or lists that change what metric(s) are being visualized across entire canvases with little effort.

By adding this functionality, the power of both parameters and data actions would increase tremendously, allowing for greater advanced analyses with minimal user input and workbook complexity.

Use Case and Business Need (Required):

As our users engage with our workbooks, one of the biggest factors for ease of access and user adoption is keeping things simple for the user. We want our users to have to work as little as possible to get to the answers they need. As of now, data actions can only pass values from data source fields and workbook calculations and they have to be within the visualization that you are performing the action on, which can be tricky when dealing with aggregate calculations partially based on flags. By passing values into parameters, we can reduce this load on the end user and keep the heavy lifting within the workbook behind the scenes.

Enhancement Request / Service Request:

Enhancement

Francis Defilippis

I am seeing many instances where setting a parameter from the data table at action and passing that to a new workbook or page could be powerful. Hopefully this can make it into a release in the near future.