Discoverer Views by Business Area

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Distribution

ODS Specialist

ODS Specialist-Limited

ODS Specialist-Restricted

Ownership

The ISDS System Usability Director is responsible for ensuring that this document is necessary, reflects actual practice, and supports University policy.

Learning to use Discoverer

To be able to create reports you need to:

know where to find the data
understand how to use the tool

Business Areas

Business Areas are logical grouping of folders or views by related subject matter.

School/Department Use HAVE TO INSERT HTML LINK

Accounts Payable
Accounts Receivable
Fixed Assets
General Ledger
HR Limited Access (select information only)
LD Labor Distribution
Order Entry
PAY Payroll
Project Billing (contains all GA Views)
Project Costing
PO Purchasing

*Must have UVA ODS Specialist‐Limited responsibility.

Folders

A folder (a.k.a. view) is a dynamic, virtual table (that exists only in memory) created or formed from columns in one or more tables in the database. (A table is a physical structure that contains data organized in rows and columns.)

Folders/Views provide:

A subset the data contained in the underlying OLTP database tables They can merge data from multiple base tables into a single virtual table

Views do not incur any extra storage overhead
Changing the data in a table alters the data shown in the view.
Limit the exposure to which a table or tables are exposed to outer world

The University uses a combination of purchased views from Noetix and custom UVA views.

Noetix views all start with a module prefix (i.e., GL, AP, PO, etc)
UVA custom views all start with “UVA”

Both sets of folders/views are defined in the Help File available from the Integrated System’s Reports web site.

Items

An item is a column of data in a folder/view.

Joins

A join relates rows from two separate tables or views so their data elements can be combined in a query.

Indexes

A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of operations in a table. Indexes can be created using one or more columns, providing the basis for both rapid random lookups and efficient ordering of access to records.

Noetix Help

Grants Accounting Data

PBPA Project Billing (GA Views)

Noetix does not as yet provide any Grants Accounting views. They do provide a number of Project module views and since the Grants Accounting module is built on top of the Projects module a number of these views are applicable.

The following Noetix view is most helpful:

PA_Projects Project attributes

ISDS has created a number of custom tables to facilitate reporting. Each of the custom tables has an associated folder/view in the PBPA Project Billing Business Area.

The following are the key UVA folders most often used in creating GA reports.

UVA_Award_Lookup Award attributes

UVA_Extra_Project_Attributes Additional Project Attributes

UVA_GL_Budget_Exec_And_ Dept Budget office organization hierarchy

UVA_PA_Expense_Detail* Expenditure only summary

UVA_PA_Exp_Com_Bud_Detail * Budget, expenditure, & commitment detail

UVA_PA_Expense_Summary * Expenditure only summary

UVA_PA_Exp_Com_Bud_Summary * Budget, expenditure, & commitment summary

*indexed by:

Period and Project Carrying Out Org
Period and Award Carrying Out Org
Project Number

General Ledger Data

Noetix supplies a number of very good GL views.

The following are the key folders most often used in creating GL reports.

GL_Chart_Of_Accounts Chart of account segments and segment descriptions.

UVA GL Object Codes Object Code attributes

GL_Journal_Entry_Lines Detail journal entry lines

GL_Balances Summary Chart of Account balances by period

UVA GL Cash Balance GL revenue netted to GA expenses by revenue project

Plus views also contained in other business areas:

PA_Projects Project attributes

UVA_Award_Lookup Award attributes

UVA_Extra_Project_Attributes Additional Project Attributes

UVA_GL_Budget_Exec_And_MBU Budget office organization hierarchy

Creating Reports

Before you begin, have a firm idea of what you are trying to accomplish. Are you looking for detail or summary data? What kind of filters/conditions will you need?

Begin by starting with a pre‐defined report (if one exists) that partially meets your needs. Then reverse engineer the report to see which folders, conditions, calculations, sorts, & totals are defined. Think about what is working and what is not. It’s best to make only minor changes at one time, rerun the report and continue to refine.

HINT: Changing one thing at a time and rerunning the report to check the results may be time consuming, but affords you the edit/undo capability which can prove invaluable. Save your changes often.

Resources

Your peers with similar needs and/or dean’s office
Customer Support Center (Help Desk): 4‐Help
Usability Group Contact (See ISDS webpage for link)
Oracle Discoverer 10g Handbook

Oracle Discoverer 10g Handbook

Effective: 08/23/2010

Revision: 1

Oracle Tutor can be licensed to modify and add to this content, documenting all of your business process documentation in the Oracle Tutor format.