OBIEE 11G Narrative View - showing Number of Records at runtime and many more ...

Narrative View in OBIEE 11G.

I am a fan of Narrative views and use it in almost all of my dashboards that I create and End users love it too.

Narrative Views can be used :
1) To show the number of records that report is yielding at run time.
2) To Show User name etc at Run time.

e.g.

If you have a requirement to show How many calls Agent has made in a day with a detailed report , you can achieve this by using Narrative Views :

Create a report with Agent Name , Call Details and Calendar Date and then Add a Pivot Table View and Narrative View to the Compound View and Edit Narrative view as following:

Select Contains HTML Markup and Rows to Display = 1.
Enter below text in Narrative section:

<center><b><font color=#0054a0 size= 3>Call Detail Report of @2 for @1 Calls <br /><p /></font></b></center>


Here "Call Detail Report of @2 for @1 Calls" is what you will see as the heading of the report. @2 and @1 are the locations of the Columns in Criteria level.

@2 is Location of  Agent Name , and @1 is the counter in my report's criteria level.

max(RCOUNT(1)) gives the number of records in the report. so if this report contains 33 records, then Max(Rcount(1)) will give 33 for each row. Add any column in selection pane and then clear the column formula and add max(RCOUNT(1)) under formula and then Hide this column in Criteria Level to hide from actual results.

Report Results will be something like the below and all End Users really love to see the results this way: To add more to it, Provide users flexibility to choose Agents from the Prompt or You can use this Narrative views for the heading for the Drill reports.

Agent Brian has made total 7 calls for today : Drill Link from Summary report to Detail report and using Narrative View

I use Narrative Views in almost all of my reports , even use them to use the different HTMLs for Heading Type and Color . Love them.