OBIEE: Dynamically calculate quarterly difference without using time series function

Sometimes, you have a custom report built from custom schema, it could be a materialized view or view that were custom made, where the number is at a certain granularity without hierarchy defined. Like you have a quarterly report, but now the requirement is to display the numbers not only in the quarter that user pick, but also display the previous quarter of that user defined quarter along. Not only that, you also need to display the difference between the quarters as well as the monthly measures under these 2 quarters. Like the report below for instance:

As you can see from the report, the user just pick 2014 Q3 and the report comes back with Q3 as well as Q2 data with month and quarter column pivoted. Now the pivot view allows us to get the total per quarter, which as you can see, is done. Now the challenge is, how are we going calculate the difference between these 2 quarterly difference?


So, let me go back a little bit. Before I got to the report was you can see, I created a new column in the RPD which brings Year and Quarter concatenated based on what this table have. In other words, i take '2014' and '3', then concatenated it 'Q' in the middle to get you 2014 Q3. 'Trim' function is used here to get rid of any unwanted spaces that is trailing as a result of converting number into string.

The next step I decided to do is to create a simple report which takes the user input quarter value, then it should return that quarter value as well as the previous quarter value using the rpd column that I just created above.

In the above report, 'Current Year Quarter' is nothing but the RPD column, the Previous Year QTR has the following formula that returns the previous Quarter:

Since the time dimension does have Date (DATE_VALUE) column, by doing timestampadd at month level with '-3' will automatically give you the month that is 3 month prior to the month of that corresponding DATE_VALUE. It also needs to address the fact that the prior quarter of Q1 should be Q4 of the previous year, therefore a case statement is embedded to take care of this situation:

TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char))

After concatenating these components together, it finally gives me what I want:

This report will be accepting the presentation variable from the dashboard prompt quarter, so i call it 'Quarter'. Save this report as 'Previous Quarter'.

Now, go back to the main report that I have been creating as you can see below:

Here in the filter section, the Year&Quarter column (which is the new RPD column) is getting value from 'Current Year Quarter' OR from 'Previous Year Column' of the report 'Previous Quarter' created above. This means that when user select 2014 Q3 from the dashboard, it will return 2014 Q3 and 2014 Q2, both will be passed to year&quarter column of this report through this filter condition. Then by pivoting the quarter and month column, it will display the view that you saw.

Now the second thing is to come up with a way to calculate difference of these 2 quarters. Unfortunately, this will have to be done with a different calculation because time series function will make it very complicated and difficult to validate the logic.

So first thing is to find a way to calculate the measure for each of the quarter and it's previous quarter. This can be done using 'filter' function by making the Year&Quarter column equal 'current quarter' or 'previous quarter' from report 'Previous quarter'.

As it turns out, OBIEE does allow to use filter function with nested query, so this is what the expression looks like below:

FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) USING ("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN (SELECT saw_0 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 ))) -  FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) USING ("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN (SELECT saw_1 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 )))

Now the break down of this expression is below:

(Below will get you Current month measure)
FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) USING
("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN
----- (The red part is the measure that we are dealing with)


(SELECT saw_0 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 )))  
---- this is the other report that we created earlier, presentation variable needs to be entered here, saw_0 represent 'current year and quarter' from that report

 -
(Below will get you previous month measure)
FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0)

USING ("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN

(SELECT saw_1 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 )))
 --- saw_1 represents the 'previous year and quarter' from that report 

Now, test the new report:

It's working nicely..

Thanks