Prompt before Opening

Question

Hello,

For one of my dashboard pages, I checked the box for "Prompt before Opening" on the Dashboard Properties window. When the user opens this page, a banner across the top indicates that you should enter values for the prompts and then press continue to run the analysis on that page.

I have one required prompt for this analysis.  However, if the user presses continue without entering the required prompt, the analysis runs anyway.

Is there a way to prevent it from running is the required prompt has not been entered?

Thank you.

Dennis

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Kind of ...

You can create an analysis that only check the value of one or multiple prompts.

Ages ago I did write about this, it wasn't exactly your use case, but all the logic is still valid and easily adapted to your needs: https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2014/03/obiee-dashboard-prompt-at-least-one-mandatory/

The idea is really to not work on any real column of any subject area, to avoid that OBIEE send a real query to the database: working only on logic based on presentation variable allows to evaluate the logic at the BI Server level, without going down to a database.

Have a look and it should get you on the right way on how to deal with this.

Dennis Hancy · Answer

Thank you for your reply.

In the Oracle documentation, under the section labeled "What Are Conditions?", it says

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* For an analysis, it evaluates the row count of the analysis.

For example, a condition might evaluate whether the results of an analysis return a number of rows greater than 0:

* If the analysis returns at least one row, then the condition evaluates to true.
* If the analysis does not return any rows, then the condition evaluates to false.

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Is there something similar for prompts?  In other words, is it possible to create a condition on the section that says "if the city prompt is not null"?

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

I believe the "Prompt before Opening" was a something added to provide a simple "two-steps" process when opening the page, mainly to inform users about the fact they need to pick prompt values and the analysis shouldn't be used without those prompts set.

If you want to really force the user to always pick all values that are required, you could implement a condition and hide/show the section with the analysis only when all the values are set in the prompt. In that way you have a more "powerful" mechanism of "prompt before opening", because you can display a longer text message telling the user to fill the prompt if it isn't. And not displaying the section also prevent the analysis to execute, so it will never run without the prompt values.