Business View DV Roles

In this section:

A traditional Business View offered users a customized logical view of a data source by grouping related items into folders that reflect business logic for an application, rather than the physical position of items in the data source. However, the fields in these folders did not have any indication of their roles in a request.

A traditional Dimension View, on the other hand, categorized fields on the basis of their roles in a request. Measures were placed in measure groups, hierarchies were organized within dimensions, levels were organized within hierarchies, and attributes were organized within levels. Then, when a field was double-clicked or dragged onto the report or chart canvas in Designer, it was added as a sort field or aggregation field depending on its placement in the Dimension View structure. Dimension Views, however, offered no ability to create a custom logical view of the data source.

DV Roles in a Business View enable you to group fields into folders and, for each field, assign a role that indicates its role in a request. The syntax is clear and simple, and it gives you total flexibility in creating folders anywhere in the structure, and in reusing fields in multiple folders.

For example, if you assign the role DIMENSION to a field, it will automatically be added to the By field container for reports and the horizontal axis for charts if you double-click or drag the field onto the report or chart canvas. If you assign the role Drill Level to successive fields in a folder and turn AUTODRILL on, automatic drilldowns will be generated from the top level to the bottom level on the generated output.

You can create or edit a synonym in the Reporting Server Web Console, the Data Management Console, or the Metadata Canvas.

Assigning DV Roles

In Business Views, you define folders, which function as segments to provide a view of the synonym and to define the accessible fields and their relationships. Folder relationships are the same as segment relationships, with parent folders, child folders, and sibling folders.

While you have total flexibility defining a structure using any fields from your data source, when you issue a report request against the synonym, the retrieval path for the data must conform to any constraints imposed by your DBMS entity diagrams and by the rules of WebFOCUS retrieval.

By default, when you open a cluster synonym in the WebFOCUS tools, the dimension nodes are created as folders in the Business View. You can add nodes or folders, but the recommendation is to use the DV structure if one already exists.

Only the folders will be displayed in the WebFOCUS tools, not the real segments, and only the fields within the folder structure will be accessible for reporting.

You can assign a DV role to a folder or field by right-clicking the folder or field and selecting a DV role.

You can explicitly assign a DV role to a folder or field, or have it automatically inherit its role from its parent. If you explicitly assign a DV role, that role moves with the object if you move it to another location within the BV structure. If you do not explicitly assign a DV role, the role changes as you move the object under a new parent, except if you move it onto a field with the Drill Level role. If moved onto a Drill Level field, the moved field inherits the Drill Level role.

The following DV roles can be assigned.

Example: Sample Dimension Folder Declaration

The DV_ROLE for the PRODUCT folder is DIMENSION.

 FOLDER=PRODUCT, PARENT=FOLDER1,
    DV_ROLE=DIMENSION, 
    DESCRIPTION='Product and Vendor', $