A dashboard consists of one or more pages that can include the following objects:
The views of an analyses
Alerts from agents
Action links and action link menus
Images
Text
Views of folders in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog
Links to Web sites
Links to documents
Embedded content (such as Web pages or documents)
Oracle BI Publisher reports
If you save the dashboard in the Dashboards subfolder directly under /Shared Folders/first level subfolder, then the dashboard will be listed in the Dashboard menu in the global header. If you save it in a Dashboards subfolder at any other level (such as /Shared Folders/Sales/Eastern), then it will not be listed.
The look of a dashboard, such as background colors and the size of text, is controlled by:
Skins — Skins control the way the Oracle BI EE interface is displayed, such as background colors, corporate logos, and the style sheets to use. Skins can be automatically assigned to users when they log on by asigning the skin session variable. Administrators can customize the default skin and create new skins.
Styles — Styles control how dashboards and results are formatted for display, such as the color of text and links, the font and size of text, the borders in tables, the colors and attributes of graphs, and so on. Styles are organized into folders that contain Cascading Style Sheets (files with a .css extension), images, and graph templates. Administrators can customize some style sheets and create new style sheets. Users can override some elements in style sheets, such as table borders and text size, when formatting results in the Results tab.
Cosmetic formatting — Cosmetic formatting affects the visual appearance of results and dashboards. You can apply it to results, columns, and sections.
Template
Dashboard template pages are dashboard pages that are used to populate the personal dashboards (My Dashboard) of new users on their initial login. This allows users to see one or more dashboard pages with content rather than an empty dashboard when they first log in. It also gives users a starting point to build their own dashboard pages.