/ Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 4: Dashboard Pages and Properties  referring to the tabs in your dashboard here, not pages in a printed dashboard. Also important to note here is the message on the screen stating that clicking Cancel does not undo operations in the section. What this means is each change you make to the individual dashboard pages here is immediately saved and immediately takes effect. Clicking Finished is not necessary to commit these changes to Oracle CRM On Demand, just as clicking Cancel does not undo the changes made to the dashboard pages here. One thing you will notice as you make changes to your dashboard pages in this section is that the screen refreshes itself after each change. This is actually the application sending the change to the database and returning to the Dashboard Properties screen. This is why the Cancel button is of no consequence here. Each page that you have added to your dashboard is listed in the Dashboard Pages section. Next to each page is the Hide Page check box. Clicking the check box makes the associated page invisible. This can be quite useful when you are updating a dashboard and are not quite ready to commit to eliminating a dashboard page or developing a new page that is not ready for user consumption. Rather than delete the old page or expose a new page too early, you can hide the page and delete or expose it later when you are comfortable doing so. Under the Operations heading, you find two buttons for each dashboard page. The first is the Rename button. Clicking Rename takes you to the Edit Item Name and Description screen, as shown in Figure 4-10. Here you can change the name of the dashboard page in the Name field and the description of the dashboard page in the Description field. The check box on this screen allows you to preserve any  Dashboard Properties window Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards references you have made to this dashboard page using the old name. If, for instance, you have set up some navigation to the selected dashboard page before changing the name of the page, you will need to preserve this reference by checking the Preserve References To Old Name Of This Item check box or update your references. After making changes to the name and description on this screen, click the Update button to commit the changes and return to the Dashboard Properties screen. Clicking Cancel takes you back to the previous page without saving changes. Also under the Operations heading for each dashboard page is a Delete Page button. This button does exactly as its name implies and permanently deletes your dashboard page. When you click the Delete Page button, you are shown the Confirm Deletion screen (see Figure 4-11) and must click the Yes link to confirm that you want to delete the dashboard page. Finally, under the Reorder heading you will find Move Up and Move Down buttons. Each click of one of these buttons will reposition the associated dashboard page one position up or down. The dashboard page listed first in this ordered list will be the first, or leftmost, tab in the dashboard. After completing changes to the dashboard properties, click the Finished button to return to the Dashboard Editor screen and continue configuring your dashboard.  Confirm Deletion screen  Edit Item Name and Description screen Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 / Blind folio:  Chapter 5 Dashboard Objects 59 Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5: Dashboard Objects  dashboard is a webpage that may contain many different elements. Most people think about dashboards as containing reports, and that is certainly the most common use of a dashboard. Reports are not the only elements that you can include in your dashboards, however. This chapter focuses on many of the nonreport elements that you may use in your dashboards. For each of these elements, I discuss the process of adding it to the dashboard, setting its properties, renaming it, and deleting it from the dashboard. Along the way, I will also provide some thoughts on different uses for these elements.  If a dashboard is an HTML page, and it is, then a section is a frame on the HTML page. Everything that you add to a dashboard will be positioned inside a section, and each section will reside in a column on the dashboard. The section is the container into which all of the other dashboard objects will go when you add them to your dashboard. If you add a dashboard object to a dashboard before placing a section, a new section is automatically created with the new object you just added to the dashboard already in the section. Every section has three buttons in the upper-right corner. The Properties button, the Rename button, and the Delete button are used to configure the section on the dashboard. Section objects are configured separately from the objects they contain. This section of this chapter describes each of the configuration options in detail. We will start with the Properties menu. When you click Properties, you are presented with five options: Guided Navigation, Format Section, Drill In Place, Arrange Horizontally, and Collapsible. The Rename and Delete options are presented in their own buttons, and are also described later on. Figure 5-1 shows the Properties menu opened on a Section object in the Dashboard Editor screen. A  Dashboard section with Properties menu Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5: Dashboard Objects   The first option under Properties on the Section object is Guided Navigation. Essentially, activating Guided Navigation on a Section object turns the entire section on or off based on the results of a source request. The source request is a report in Oracle CRM On Demand. In order to understand this concept, it may be necessary to step back just a bit and discuss the role of reports in Oracle CRM On Demand. Reports in Oracle CRM On Demand can serve many purposes, the most obvious of which is a report that you view on the screen to view or analyze your customer relationship management (CRM) data. The report can be so much more than that, ranging from a simple list of records to hosting custom JavaScript code to expanding the functionality of the Oracle CRM On Demand application. At its core, the CRM On Demand report is a query against the Oracle CRM On Demand database. A query, regardless of complexity, will do one of two things: return results or return no results. In Figure 5-2 you see the Guided Navigation Section Properties window that opens when you select Guided Navigation in the Section Properties menu. The instruction at the top of this window indicates that you should “specify a Source Request to create a conditional Dashboard Section. The section will always appear if no Source Request is referenced.” The first field on this window is a radio button selector indicating if a source request should or should not be referenced. The default setting here is No for the reference source request. That means any section that you add to a dashboard without modifying guided navigation properties will always appear in the dashboard, as it is not referencing another source request. So, what happens if we change this setting to Yes and reference a source request? If a source request is referenced by the section, the section will only display if the specified criteria are met. Select a source request in the Source Request field by  Guided Navigation Section Properties window Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5: Dashboard Objects  clicking the Browse button and selecting a report from the Shared Folders. Next, determine when the section, and all of its contents, should appear on the dashboard. Your choice is to make it appear when the source request returns rows or when the source request returns nothing. Uses for this feature vary. You could display a section only when there are open opportunities over a certain size for instance. This would require a simple report that is filtered on the revenue amount and sales stage on opportunities. Let us assume we want to only show a report that lists activities associated with opportunities when there are open opportunities with more than one million dollars in revenue. This activity report will appear at the top of our dashboard to bring the user’s attention to these very important activities. The rest of the dashboard may contain other reports about smaller opportunities, leads, and other activities, but this urgent activity report will simply not be visible when there are no big opportunities, and it will be visible when there are. First, create the Source Request report. This report does not need to be designed for viewing if its only purpose is to perform a check for the existence of large open opportunities. This report can be a simple report that includes only a single column and a couple of filters. An example of this is shown in Figure 5-3. Here I have added  Source request report Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5: Dashboard Objects  the # of Opportunities metric column and two filters. One filter eliminates all opportunities that are closed, and the other filter eliminates all opportunities that are less than one million dollars in revenue. The result is either no results or a single row with the number of open opportunities with more than one million in revenue. Next, since this is a book about dashboards, I am going to assume we already have the report built that we want to display on the dashboard. We will skip that step and go back to the dashboard and adjust the Guided Navigation property on the section. On the Guided Navigation Properties window, select the Source Request report that performs the check for the large open opportunities. Since we want to see this section only when this report returns rows, select the If Request Returns Rows radio button and click OK. Now the section and all of its contents will appear in the dashboard only when there are open opportunities with one million dollars in revenue or more. If the Source Request report returns no results, the section will not appear at all. Figure 5-4 shows an example of this dashboard when there are million-dollar opportunities, and Figure 5-5 shows an example of this dashboard when there are no million-dollar opportunities. Both figures are the same dashboard, with the difference being the presence of large opportunities in the first figure and no large opportunities in the second. Notice that the section containing the Opportunity report has completely disappeared in Figure 5-5.  Dashboard with section visible due to large opportunities Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5: Dashboard Objects  Some variations on the use of the Guided Navigation feature include using it to hide reports with no results and adding data access security to the dashboard by hiding sections for particular users.  If you are familiar with the custom No Results view on a report, then you know that you can replace the default No Results image with some custom text in your report. This custom text only appears when the report contains no rows. Using Guided Navigation, you can take this one step further within your dashboard. The source request for your section can be the same report contained within the section. By setting up the section in this way, you are effectively displaying the report only when there is something to display, and hiding it otherwise. Using this method, you can build dashboards that only display reports when there is something to report. The risk here is that your users, if not informed of this logic, may assume that your dashboard is not functioning properly because it contains certain reports some times and not others. It is wise to include some explanatory text in a section that will always appear on the dashboard using the Text object.  This next use of the Guided Navigation feature is one that I devised to counteract the lack of dashboard-specific access controls. I want to be able to control who sees  Dashboard with section hidden due to no large opportunities Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5: Dashboard Objects  my dashboards, whether it be by user role, reporting level, territory, or specific individual. This capability is not something that is native to Oracle CRM On Demand. You cannot place dashboards in access-controlled folders like you can with reports. Any user who has access to the Dashboard tab will be able to see all dashboards in the Select Dashboard list. There is no way around this, as of this writing. There are certainly ways to control which users see report data and which users can view entire reports, and those controls hold true in the dashboard in that a user who cannot see a report because it is in a folder that they have no access to will not see that report in a dashboard. The section will still be visible, so in the case of a section with a single report, the report may disappear because the user has no access to the report folder, but the section remains, so any section border, Collapse button, or other formats are still visible and will look out of place. The report folder security is also role-based, so you are forced to use roles as the determining factor in who sees the report. Using the Guided Navigation option on the dashboard section and a little ingenuity with your Source Request report, you can effectively set up some visibility rules based on many different factors. So let us walk through the secret to this type of visibility control. First, the key is the Source Request report. We will use a couple of different filters on this request to ensure that rows are returned in the report only when a user who should have access to the dashboard is the user signed in to Oracle CRM On Demand. For this example, I will limit the dashboard access to users who have a sales role, are assigned to the East territory, and are in my branch of the user hierarchy. This level of control is hardly possible with standard report access controls. To set up the Source Request report, we can create a new report using virtually any subject area as long as it contains the User domain, since we are only interested in user data for this report. To the report we add the User Name column. Next we add several filters. First is the User Email is equal to the REPLUSER session variable. Running the report at this point would simply return the name of the individual signed in. We do not want this report to return any values unless the user has a sales role, is in the East territory, and reports up to me. This calls for a few more filters, as shown in Figure 5-6. With all of these filters set, the only time this report will return a result is for a user who meets all of the specified criteria. For me, it is not enough to just hide the sections on the dashboard if a user does not have access to it. Since all users will still be able to see it listed on the Dashboard tab and show the dashboard, even if it is empty, I like to include a section that only appears when the source request returns no results. In this section, I include a Text object that informs users that they are not authorized to view the dashboard. This way, users who attempt to view a dashboard that they have no access to are not allowed to assume that the dashboard is malfunctioning because nothing appears on the screen. Figure 5-7 shows an example of a dashboard with such a message displayed due to the source request returning no rows. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5: Dashboard Objects   Clicking the Properties button on a section in your dashboard brings up the Properties menu. The second option on this menu is Format Section. Clicking Format Section opens the Section Properties window shown in Figure 5-8. If you are familiar with formatting views and cells in reports, which I have to assume you are if you are this deep into this book, then you have seen a window similar to this before.  Source report with filters  Dashboard with “user not authorized” message Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. [...]... Place option on one section can result in replacing the entire dashboard with a drill-down result, regardless of what the other sections contain or their settings Arrange Horizontally The Arrange Horizontally option on the Properties menu is a toggle Clicking the Arrange Horizontally option will enable or disable the option When enabled, a check mark appears next to the Arrange Horizontally option Please... Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark 69 70   Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards The Arrange Horizontally setting controls how items within the section are arranged when the dashboard displays The dashboard objects will always be arranged vertically in sections on the Dashboard Editor screen, but when the Arrange Horizontally option is enabled, the message “(Arrange Horizontally)” appears... horizontally takes up less room and is a cleaner look than using multiple columns and sections Collapsible The Collapsible option on the Properties menu is also a toggle Clicking the Collapsible option will enable or disable the option When enabled, a check mark appears next to the Collapsible menu option You may have noticed on some of the dashboards in Oracle CRM On Demand that there is a small button... Copy, and Paste icons are in the upper-right corner of the Section Heading Properties window, allowing you to copy and paste all of the settings from one section heading to another Delete Wrapping up our tour of the Section object on the dashboard, we have the Delete button Its function is obvious If you click the Delete button on the Section object, the entire section and all of its contents are removed... section are not visible, but the Collapse button remains visible Clicking this button again expands the section, exposing the section contents This allows the user to turn sections of the dashboard on or off at will This can be particularly useful when the dashboard is rather long and requires a lot of scrolling It is also useful if you want to print a portion of the dashboard Rename The Rename button on. ..D Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter 5:  Dashboard Objects  Figure 5-8.  Section Properties window Within the Cell portion of the Section Properties window, you are able to apply horizontal and vertical alignment and add a background color to the section Don’t let the word “Cell” confuse you here I suspect it is the product of code reuse from other areas of the Answers On Demand application The settings... section name with a custom name here on the Rename window You can also format the section heading by clicking the Properties button to the right of the section name field Clicking the Properties button opens the Section Heading Properties window shown in Figure 5-12 In the Font section of the Section Heading Properties window, you can select a different font family The options here are Arial, Arial Black,... the dashboard sections This button, shown in Figure 5-10, is the Collapse button When the characters on the button are pointing up, the section is expanded When pointing down, the section has been collapsed Notice in Figure 5-10 that the contents of the Figure 5-10.  Collapsible dashboard sections Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark D Lairson / 174 534-3 Chapter... browser pop-up window that includes the text “Mike Lairson.” Your other destination option on the Link or Image Properties window is Request This is referring to a report request in Oracle CRM On Demand Select the Request radio button, and rather than enter a URL in the Destination field, you will browse for the desired report Click the Browse button and the Choose Request window opens with the Company... 5-12.  Section Heading Properties window Within the Border portion of the Section Heading Properties window, you can add single, double-line, or thick borders to one or more sides of your section heading You are able to select only one style of border for the dashboard section To add a border, you can choose All from the Position field to apply a border to all four sides, or you can click on the sides . / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards. watermark. / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Michael D. Lairson / 174 534-3  Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards / Oracle CRM On Demand Dashboards