OBIEE Bar Graph Custom Coloring

Hamza Shakeel

Hi Guys,

I am creating a graph that has channels as bars ( x axis)  and its rating ( y-axis) for a month. I want to fix a color for each channel meaning that I want each bar to have a different color. Is that possible?

I do have dimension of Channel. Is there a way to fix color scheme to each channel so in future every graph takes that color?

Regads,

Farrukh Nasir Siddiqui

[Deleted User]

A "channel" as you say will be a named member inside a dimension and member colouring happens dynamically. Members are dynamically retrieved and can change over time.

JustTheFacts

Hello Farrukh,

As Christian says, colors are assigned at run-time (sort of, see below) and without intervention by the analysis builder they could change if, for example, filters or prompts change the list of Channels that might appear in the graph. IF your list of Channels is fixed and IF you always sort them by their name or other dimension attribute at the same grain as your X axis, then the default color selections should be consistent from graph to graph of the same graph type (possibly even between graph types, but I haven't tested it).

However, you can also force certain colors onto Channels when you build a graph, and then at run-time your chosen colors will be used. This is done using conditional formatting (graph properties -> Style tab -> Style and Conditional Formatting link -> Conditional Formatting tab). This only affects that one graph, though, so the process must be repeated for each new visualization.

There is no way to set it up so that Channel "foo" is always green and Channel "bar" is always blue, no matter what graph type is being used nor who builds it, without manually-configured conditional formatting.

We had a similar requirement in our environment - a need to color business teams consistently across several reports on several pages of a dashboard. There was no getting around meticulous configuration of each report, unfortunately, and we understood from the start that "Business Team" was a very-slowly-changing dimension, so maintenance was not a burden.

Good luck.

Robert Angel

It always amazes me that business foibles / taste drives excessively over engineered analyses / reports which also drives excessively expensive to create and maintain analysis / reports.

I would push back with "if you take the default colours it is a X day job to create and over time will require no additional maintenance. Or you can have custom colours which add no value beyond the user not having to look at the key on the graph, which will cost X + Y days to develop and will drive + Z days everytime there is a new colour band to add or remove from the graph." - or this is how much your taste costs the business...

Reminds me of hitch-hikers guide - "they just invented the wheel. Now there is a focus group discussing what colour it should be" - welcome to the B ark.

[Deleted User]

"A bunch of mindless *** who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

H2G2 is just a timeless classic :-D