Discoverer Administration Problem

Question

Hi Everyone,
I am wondering whether we can change the color/ font of items with in a folder in a Business Area using Discoverer Administrative tool or Is there any way to differentiate the items with in a folder into sub-categories?
Please Help me in this regards.
Thanks..
Venu

Answer 1

Hi Venu
There is no way to use different fonts or colors within the Admin tool. My recommended approach, and one that we teach in training, is to use what we call Item Separators. These are basically items that group other items below them.
Item separators are used to break up and group sets of items together. These help the users to understand about the different data sets that are in our folders. We can also use the Description field of these items to provide more generic help about how to use the folder.
To insert an item separator, use this workflow:
1. Right-click on the name of the folder into which you want to insert an item separator.
2. From the pop-up menu, select New Item - Discoverer opens the New Calculation dialog box.
3. Give the item a Name such as: Main Section
4. In Calculation use NULL.
5. Click OK to complete the calculation.
6. Right-click on the item and rename it like this: **** M a i n S e c t i o n ****
7. Move the item to its correct position.
Note: we use double-spacing between the letters in a word, and triple-spacing between words.
This is a trick from mainframe days when there were no fonts or colors. Using double or triple-spacing fools the eye of the user into thinking that a bigger font has been used. Try it for yourself. You will be amazed at the effect and will wonder why you never did this before.
By the way, a similar technique can be used for grouping folders. A separator folder is really an empty folder that is being used to group sets of folders together. Users cannot select anything from these folders, but that is exactly what we want.
To create a separator folder separator, use the following workflow:
1. Right-click on the name of the business area into which you want to insert a separator folder separator.
2. From the pop-up menu, select New Folder. Discoverer now adds a new folder, called NewFolder1, to the bottom of the list of folders. The identifier for this new folder will also be NEWFOLDER1, all in upper case.
3. Using the Folder Properties dialog box, give the folder a new name and a new identifier. Use something like *** P O M e t r i c s *** for the name and PO_METRICS for the identifier. (make sure the identifier is in uppercase with no spaces
4. Move the separator folder to its new position.
By the way, if you have a copy of my Oracle Discoverer 10g Handbook you will find these tips on pages 642 and 645 complete with illustrations.
I hope this helps
Regards
Michael