MyCabi.NET

Yes, the title of this post isn’t the most eloquent of titles, but it serves the purpose. One of my co-workers was having an issue where he wanted to hide a column that was being displayed in a table but wanted to use that column later on in a pivot table. When he would go and hide the column using the criteria view or through the table view, as you would expect, the column also vanished from the Pivot Table. Now, knowing what I know about OBIEE and how it likes to use order of operations when dealing with showing and not showing various pieces of a report, I figured this issue could be solved in a similar manner and I turned out to be right. The solution is so simple is just makes me laugh, but I am better that many of you out there aren’t aware of this simple trick.

I created this short demo so you can see how I was able to accomplish this. This was done in the Usage Tracking subject area.

Here you can see I hide the Year Column.

I went into the Compound View and added in a pivot table. All is showing as it should with the year column no longer visible.

Here I have trimmed down my Pivot Table to show just the Query Count and the Year.

I now go and change the Year to Hidden, even though it’s already hidden in the criteria view. In the same step, I again go into Year and remove the hidden check mark. This will over-write whatever the Criteria view has set and will allow the column to show up in the report. Simple, but effective.

I know that often times I’ve been asked to create a report using a Table view so as to allow users to use the dynamic sorting functionality and at the same time have wanted to bring in attributes into a secondary pivot, but was unable do so because of the default functionality of the table view…now I can. Enjoy.