Discoverer Preferred Preferences

Question

Our environment:
OracleBI Discoverer 10g (10.1.2.2)
Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Plus 10g (10.1.2.54.25)
Discoverer Model - 10.1.2.54.25
Discoverer Server - 10.1.2.54.25
End User Layer - 5.1.1.0.0.0
End User Layer Library - 10.1.2.54.25
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - 64bi
People in our user group and I are inclined to switch the "Aggregation Behavior" preferred preference 1 instead of the default 0. We recognize that this could produce erroneous results for some calculations (e.g. statistical or percentages are good examples).
As long as our user community is aware of this, are there any other risk associated with making this change?
Also, I am curious who has made this change in an Oracle Applications EUL environment?
Thanks,
Patrick

Answer 1

Hi Sandra
No problem, glad you saw the other posting.
When you launch the registry editor, REGEDIT, you will see 2 panes. The left pane contains folders and the right pane contains the items within those folders. To get to where Discoverer is stored you need to do the following:
1. Click the + key alongside HKEY_CURRENT_USER to expand the group
2. Locate and expand the Software group
3. Locate and expand the Oracle group
4. Locate and expand the Discoverer 10 group
Depending whether the machine is also using Discoverer Administration, you will now see all of some of the following folders:
Administrator
Application
Crosstab
Database
Debug
Fonts
Generic Properties
Report
Session Manager
Table
Of all these, when working in Desktop the only ones you will really need to be concerned with are Application and Database.
Click on Application for a second. In the right-hand pane you will see two differernt kinds of item. You will see some with an icon containing blue letters (these are numeric items), and you will see some that have an icon with brown letters a and b (these are text items).
When you're adding new items, you right-click in the right-hand pane and select New, followed by the type of item you want to add. For numeric items you pick DWORD, while for text items you pick String value.
For the numeric items, typically you will use 1 and 0, with 1 meaning true or on, and 0 meaning false or off.
Word of wisdom: you will generally not see all of the available options when you expand a folder. They are still being applied though and will typically be defaulted to 0. Sometimes you have to manually add items in order to change the behavior.
By the way, when you launch Desktop have you ever been frustrated by how long the Discoverer Desktop popup stays on the screen? This is just a setting. There is nothing going on behind the scenes while it is displaying, Oracle are just advertising. In the Application folder try changing the setting for SplashDelayMsecs from 4000 to 0 and see what happens. Your users will probably like this.
Best wishes
Michael