Have any improvements been made in OBIEE12c to simplify conditional formatting on rows?

Question

In OBIEE 11g, to implement  conditional formatting  on a row, you needed to apply the same condition to every column in the row.   Even this workaround didn't apply conditional formatting

to the row header, only cell values were formatted.     In addition,the ability to apply conditional formatting based on specific row heading names (i.e.member name) or  level in a hierarchy

would also be helpful.    Those of us used to the rich conditional formatting options in Hyperion Reports would love to see improvements in this area to simplify the migration of

Hyperion Reports to OBIEE.     Alternatively, does BI Publisher offer any better support for conditional formatting that is comparable with Hyperion Reports?

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

So as said: no real changes.

Actually nothing changed on conditional formatting between 11g and 12c in Answers.

Actually if you define using the UI the rules it isn't a OR, and it isn't a AND.

OBIEE will evaluate all the rules and apply all of them if they are valid in the order.

So if a rule set a background color and a second one a font color the result is the addition of both rules, but if both rules set the same style element only one will end up on the screen.

Tinotarantino-Oracle · Answer

Gianni,

I don't think my original question was clear .    However, I discovered a blog you write several years ago that did answer my question.

https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/03/the-secret-life-of-conditional-formatting-in-obiee/

In your blog you talk about the limitation in OBIEE 11g related to doing conditional formatting on multiple columns in  a pivot view.

I have one column pivoted on the row (Year) and a second column (Amount) that I need to conditionally format.    I need the

condition to be true only when both conditions on "Year" AND "Amount" are TRUE.    Apparently,  OBIEE's default behavior is to

evaluate each condition independently (i.e.. it only supports OR boolean logic).   In your blog, you provide a solution which involves

manually modifying the generated XML.     This resolved the issue, but the solution is not practical for the casual business user.

I wanted to know if this limitation was resolved in 12c.

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Hi,

No real changes but some of the things you wrote are already there in 11g...

Row headers format is still fixed, you can set condition rules based on members name, and you can also set different formats per level of a hierarchy (this isn't really conditional formatting, just normal formatting).

If you mean you would like to have a conditional formatting of your cell for example only when cell value > 10 and hierarchy level (if time for example) = month then you just need to expose these informations so you can use them in the condition rule (mainly if your source is Essbase there are some generic columns you can add returning level or generation for hierarchies, member names etc.). A lot can be done, but sometimes you must not look in the same place as another tool does and just adapt yourself to the tool.

As you can have really complex conditions you can do really a lot.