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Friday, July 14, 2006

Row Banding in Oracle Answers

Row banding is something that is used frequently to help make multi-row data more readable. That is a truism.
Oracle Answers (part of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) has support for row banding.
Here's a quick example:
This is a crosstab (called "Pivot Table" in Answers) built on the Video Stores schema. Here the report is grouped by "Region", and the measures are "Sales" and "Profit". "City" is the other item. The report is paged by "Product Description".

By default this check box is checked off. But I can check it on to enable banding. The default color here is "green bar", and the alternate banding applies only to the innermost columns. Simply speaking this means that it will apply to the non grouped items.

This should make it clearer. Region is not banded as it is a grouped item. City, Sales, and Profit are.


If I now choose the "All Columns" option from the dropdown, the banding applied is as shown below.
As you can see, even the Region column is now included in the alternate row banding.

Not that I am restricted only to the light green color. I can go and set an alternate format. I select a bright yellow (would this be canary yellow? probably not... let's call it bright yellow)


Voila - here is my color banding in yellow now. Bright yellow at that.