Visual Builder Component for Oracle Analytics — Part 5 — Mobile
Introduction
Mobile, whether a phone or tablet is one of the most used platforms for consuming analytics. Visual Builder (VB) combined with the Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) web component, available in the VB exchange, makes the creation of mobile analytic applications easy using a low code approach.
This has numerous applications, such as the creation of ‘tactical’ analytic applications, specific to a particular use case, that take advantage of features of the mobile platform. My blog on creation of filters with the analytics component uses the example of filtering on location, a feature that could be deployed on mobile to automatically return items of interest (e.g. customers or sales leads) based on the location of a mobile device.
Here is an example of a custom analytic mobile app built using VB and embedding content from Oracle Analytics Cloud:
Creating a Mobile App
Visual Builder provides a specific option to create mobile applications, in addition to mobile targeted options, such as support for Progressive Web Applications (PWAs). Here is the UI for creating a mobile app with options for navigation style and ability to define the navigation items.
The next page of the wizard provides additional time saving with options to define the page layout in more detail resulting in a functional template as a starting point for adding analytics content.
The OAC component will work in the same way for VB mobile applications as it does for web applications that have been described in this series of blogs (see part one for the links to the other topics covered). In the screenshot below, you’ll see an example of the VB mobile page template with ‘placeholders’ that can be used to display the analytics content. In this case, you can see the first and third placeholders are empty and an analytics canvas has been added to the second placeholder.
In this example, I’ve chosen the option to ‘Disable mobile layout’ for the analytics canvas. While this would seem counter-intuitive when building a mobile app, it’s usage stems from a different scenario for analytics embedding. It’s always worth experimenting with these settings until you have achieved the exact user experience you require.
In a mobile app, whether or not to show the filter bar on the embedded analytics is entirely dependent on your use case but you may prefer to use the VB selector components and set the analytics filters using JSON.
Other settings for the analytics component that you may want to experiment with include the style, in this example I’ve set it as follows:
At the VB app level, there are settings that are specific to the mobile nature of the app, including enabling support for PWA. When testing your application, as seen below, a QR code (blurred in the image below) is provided to help you test on your mobile device.
Summary
This blog has highlighted some of the considerations and settings when using the Oracle Analytics web component within a Visual Builder mobile app. The possibilities are endless for creating apps that take advantage of the power of analytics combined with the low code ease of creating apps that take advantage of the mobile platform.
