Is there any way i can Order a Filter in Oracle Analytics(Oas)

Question

Hi, i´ve been trying to order my 'Year' filter in a descending way. However, i haven´t really been able to achieve this.

I did got the result i wanted in the 'Prepare' Section Tho.

But, when i go to the visualization mode, it just seems like I'm not applying anything.

As you can see there is a new dataset created in the 'Prepare' Section, which should be the one i'm able to see above.

I tried to do this in the OracleBi Admin Tool but i couldn't because i can't do a Select in the expression builder(Not Kidding, i've tried it in different ways but i can't get it to work)

I'm sure there must be another way and i'm just stuck in this 'Basic' task, but i can't really find a solution rn.

I would really appreciate any help or suggestion here, or if it's the case, someone telling me this can't be done(Which i don't really think, but anything can be)

User_2JH9V · Answer

Thank you so soo much, really guys!

haha of course it takes longer, but to be fair, i'm not sure i would have been able to understand Christian's reply as easily as yours(Gianni).

I did what you told me, and it does respect the order, both in the technical column and in the colmn filtered by this one.

Again, thank you guys so much, i really thought i wouldn't be able to pull this one.

[Deleted User] · Answer

It's one of those tl;dr days ;)

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Thanks, now I believe I understand your request.

So you are using OAS 5.9, you have your subject areas coming from the RPD and you use them in DV, all good till here.

Technically in the RPD you don't sort things, that's why you don't have an attribute on the presentation or logical column to set an ascending or descending sort. The only thing that you could set is to sort based on another column, and this is used mainly for sorting month names: January, February, etc. would be wrong with August first in an alphabetical sorting and that's why it's possible to tell the RPD to sort based on another column which generally is a numeric representation of the month making January 1, February 2 etc.

Any sorting of data coming from the RPD was to be done in the front end: when building an analysis there were all the sort options in the criteria, when creating a filter it was also possible to sort things if needed etc.

Taking your example of a "Year" column, the default sorting is ASC, from the smaller to the larger, so 2022 is at the end of the list.

To be fair I'm not aware of a way to set a default DESC sorting on a column from a subject area, because that's not a feature a subject area (and a presentation column) provides. A way to do it would be, as you did, creating a new dataset and preparing it differently or things like that, but it would not be the subject area itself. Sorting options in DV exists for the visualization, but couldn't find anything for the filter.

A possible workaround worth trying, is to cheat using the sort based on another column in the RPD (the one I did mention above).

Create a new column in the RPD being "Year" * -1, add this as "Sort order column" of your "Year" column (no need to add the new column to the subject area, it's only a technical column).

With some luck DV will respect the feature of "sort order column" and therefore your years will be sorting descending.

(and of course me writing a lot of bla-bla takes longer than Christian posting the same concept :D  )