Visual Builder Component for Oracle Analytics — Part 4 — Navigation

Introduction

In this blog, which is part 4 of a series on using the Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) Component for Visual Builder (VB), I’ll describe how to use the component with a navigation UI component. This enables you, as a developer, to provide a curated user experience for your analytic application users in terms of what analytics content they are able to access.

How to Create a Navigation Experience

If you’ve had a chance to review the previous blogs in this series so you’ll know that the Analytics component provides a parameter for the ‘display tab’ which is a way to reference a canvas in an Oracle Analytics project.

Using VB variables that have their value set using, for example, a ‘Navigation List‘ UI component, that variable can then be used to specify a particular canvas to show in the application, resulting in a navigation user experience, as seen in the image below:

Using a Navigation List to Allow End User Canvas Navigation

For each of the items in the navigation list shown in the above example (i.e. Sales Trend, Qty Ordered and Sales / Orders), there is an action chain defined that sets the value of a variable when an event is invoked.

Taking the example of the ‘Sales Trend’ item in the navigation list, you’ll see in the screenshot below that there is an action chain that runs on a click event.

Illustration of Event Invoked when Navigation Item Clicked

The action chain maps a value to the variable vCanvasID a value of ‘1’ as seen in the following two screen captures.

Action Chain Definition

Variable Mapping

But where do you find out what number to use in the variable mapping?

You can get that reference from the Developer menu, Embed tab, for the project you are using in Oracle Analytics as seen below. In this case, we need to use the active-tab-id of ‘1’ to view the canvas ‘Sales Trend’ in the VB application.

Obtaining the Value to Use to Reference a Specific Canvas

Once we have got the variable created, the navigation list setup and the action chain to set the appropriate value for the variable, we can then reference that variable in the analytics component as highlighted below.

How to Reference a Variable for a Canvas Reference in OAC Component

It’s now possible to set the required variable mapping for the click event and associated action chain each of the navigation list items.

Example of Navigation Between Analytics Canvases in a VB Application