Implementing Navigate in Union reports for BICS

As we all know Navigate does not work in OBIEE when we are in a Union report. In such scenarios you need to implement the navigate yourself using GoURL. This approach has been there since OBIEE 10g and continues to work in 12c and in BICS. I ran into this issue for one of the projects I am working on and instead of just documenting and passing the steps to my colleague I thought of blogging it so that everyone can benefit.

OBIEE provides entry points for most functionality exposed in the system and calls can be made through HTTP using a simple GoURL URL syntax or JavaScript commands. The most basic form for the URL is 

http://server_name_or_ip_address/analytics/saw.dll?Go

We can use the GoURL approach to simulate a navigate by hand coding all the parameters to be passed. 

Step1: We will use the navigate to web page option to navigate to the OBIEE report / dashboard. 

For this to work we will need to deconstruct the full URL for navigate which is given below with the variables highlighted in bold. 

https://bi-a426404-test.analytics.us2.oraclecloud.com/analytics/saw.dll?Go&Path=@{Path}&Action=@{Action}&col1=@{col1}&val1=@{val1}

For the report highlighed below the mandatory fields are

Path = /company_shared/Transport Reports/Common/Job Details Report (noted we do not need to worry about encoding space and other special characters. OBIEE will do that when calling.)

Action = Navigate 

We can also add the parameters to be passed from the main report by using additional col1..n and val1..n parameters to the GoURL as shown in the image below. 

In my example below I am filtering on 2 columns as shown below. 

1. The col1 contains is set to type value with the value set to the column name which is "C - Dim Job"."Job Completed Month". Again as before we do not need to worry about encoding quotes and spaces since BICS will do that for us at the time of calling this URL. 
2. I get the value from the report and have mapped the type as Column value and selected the specific column

 Finally we need to define the URL with the parameters which in my case is as follows

https://bi-a426404-test.analytics.us2.oraclecloud.com/analytics/saw.dll?Go&Path=@{Path}&Action=@{Action}&col1=@{col1}&val1="@{val1}"&col2=@{col2}&val2="@{val2}"

 Note that in the URL above I am using the variables (path / action etc.) as parameters to the URL so that at the time of calling presentation services encodes it properly. 

While this approach is definitely more time consuming that just doing a navigate, the variables and parameters in the action link definitely make life a lot easier compared to how this was defined in OBIEE 10g. 

If you want to discuss how to use this functionality or in general how to leverage on your BICS investment please feel free to contact us.