OBIEE BI Publisher prompts not visible when added to dashboard page

When creating a BI Publisher report from a BIP data model, we can add prompts on the report directly to have interactivity on the report. This is specifically useful if you end up creating a BIP report when all required field are not available in the Subject Area, and the report is more like a one-of report (not requiring any further Ad-Hoc analysis).

The report and prompts work well when accessed from a catalog directly. But when you try to add the same BIP report to a dashboard page, it does not show the prompts for some reason.

There are two workarounds for this problem:

1. Build the BI Publisher report from a Subject Area (and not a data model) and then use dashboard prompts to have interactivity on the report. This may not be an easy option for most cases, because if it was, you might not have started with a BI Publisher report in the first place.

2. Second and easy option is to create a link to BI Publisher report on the dashboard instead of directly adding it to the page. This is a bit tricky, but it allows report to be accessed through a dashboard link. If you try to add link, ordinarily, you will not be able to browse to the BI Publisher object:

To avoid the above situation, select "Destination" as URL, and copy the report URL there, but replace server name and port number by "../" . This is very important from migration to higher environments perspective. 

Once the page is saved, navigating back to the dashboard page will show a link to the BI Publisher report: 

Clicking on it does open the BI report with all the interactivity required. 

Date column showing values 0/0/0 12:00:00 AM in OBIEE 11g

Noticed strange appearance of dates in certain cases as below:

I checked the database, the date values for these records was null. It appears there is an easy fix for the problem: 

Open RPD > go to the problem date field > find physical layer column for that field > open physical layer column properties. 

The date might have been set to be Not Nullable. Make sure to Check 'Nullable' property in the physical layer

From data perspective the physical layer properties doesn't make much difference, but BI uses this for formatting reasons. An another example might be if you have a varchar field of length 150, but in physical layer you set it to 100, then BI presentation layer will only display upto 100 characters and truncate the rest. This situation is particularly possible when database changes are made by DBA after importing physical table in the RPD, and changes are not communicated to OBIEE architects.


Thankfully this was an easy fix (very annoying though)