Legend to Performance Tiles
Performance Tiles are easy to create, but a little supporting code can improve their effectiveness. Legends define the ranges clearly and give context to the metrics. With the logic exposed, the description can contain information on underlying calculations or data lineage.
The original tiles from the OBIEE 11.1.1.7 Sample App ( Performance Indicators from the 1.10 New Features Demo dashboard):
I’ll walk through each of the tiles to outline the changes. This article assumes that you are able to create a performance tile and are familiar with editing dashboards and analyses.
Discount Ratio
Properties
I resized the tiles to allow more room for a legend:
The conditional formatting in the sample application contains an error – the green format is shown instead of red. The conditions do not take into account that Discount Ratio is a percentage:
To create legends that correspond to the conditional formatting, drill in and note the background colors for each rule:
Static Text Legend
One approach to creating the legend is using a Static Text block:
This format will work for most three-value performance tiles. The width is set to match the tile, the colors and text match the ranges in the conditional formatting window for the corresponding performance tile. This is the html code:
<td><table width=180><tr>
<td style=’background:#669966;text-align:center’> under 6%</td>
<td style=’background:#FFFF99;text-align:center’>6 to 8%</td>
<td style=’background:#BC6866;text-align:center’>over 8%</td>
</tr></table></td>
Formatting
I changed the font colors to black. It’s very difficult to get a readable tile with a variety of colors without choosing a very dark font because only the background color changes conditionally – not the font color – so choose a black font and lighter colors.
I also increased the sizes of the fonts to take advantage of the larger tile.
Avg Order Size
Static Text Legend
This version contains two rows to mimic the colored underlining of the conditional format for this tile.
<td><table width=180><tr>
<td style=’text-align:center’>under 800</td>
<td style=’text-align:center’>800 to 1000</td>
<td style=’text-align:center’>over 1000</td>
</tr><tr style=’height=10′>
<td style=’background:#CC3333′></td>
<td style=’background:#FFFF00′></td>
<td style=’background:#7EB679′></td>
</tr></table></td>
Unit Price
Narrative Legend with Mouseover
Especially when the option to Compress Values (e.g. 1000 = 1K) is selected, there are occasions where the loss of precision causes confusion. I changed the data format of Unit Price to one decimal place to simulate a case like this. I added another Unit Price column to the analysis containing the original three decimal precision. To make this value available, the Legend is built with a narrative view and used a span tag with a title wrapping the table to display the underlying value on mouse over:
<td><span title=”@4″><table width=180><tr>
<td style=’background:#BC6866;text-align:center’>under 6</td>
<td style=’background:#FFFFFF;text-align:center’>6 to 9</td>
<td style=’background:#FF9933;text-align:center’>9 to 12</td>
<td style=’background:#7EB679;text-align:center’>over 12</td>
</tr></table></span></td>
This technique is valuable when the performance tile shows a current value while the conditional formatting is based on a trend; the mouse over can display a string displaying both values and the logic used to choose the background color.
Further Improvement
Performance tiles invite the user to click through to investigate – this is configured by setting up an interaction on the analysis column displayed in the performance tile. Additional conditional formatting options are available if you create your own tiles using pivot tables.
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