OBI - Data Visualization / VA - filtering

When working with Oracle Visual Analyzer / Data Visualization (will be described as VA in the post), most of the work with filtering is trivial, but there are few tricks to be aware of.

The basics:

We can create filters in VA by marking values and selecting (right click and keep selected) from the canvas:

Or by dragging a column to the filter area:

We can put a column in filter area without any values selected. In those cases, they work as "sort of" prompts, waiting for the project user to select values:

 

Measure in filter will show a little histogram of possible values, when we can drag the bar bellow, to select the limits.

I prefer typing Minimum ans Maximum values.

If we enter only minimum value that means greater than. In our case Revenue >1000:

Entering both Min and Max created between. i will leave it up to you to guess what entering only Max means.

To clear the value, press the greyed Min / Max button.

Please notice the "By", at the bottom of the picture.  By default the Measure is aggregated by all the attributes in the project (in our case Product, Year and Quarter).

What can I do if I want to see only product with Revenue>1000, for all the periods? I will remove the relevant marks:

 

Attributes in filter are based on searching and selecting:

the search pattern is "contains" and values can be selected by clicking on them or selecting "Add all" (usually after a search). When nothing selected, the filter is not active.

For example I typed 'Ga', and pressed "Add All"

Less Basic:

You might have seen an icon at the right part of the filter section:

This is an extra filter menu:

The interesting part here is the "add Expression Filter" option.

Here we can do some extra interesting things.

 

For example only products with first letter 'G':

 

All we need to do is select a function from the list and drag relevant columns to the Expression Filter window:

 

Here, at the Expression Filter,  all our dynamic filters can live happily ever after.