Since we’re away for a little bit of a late summer break, to keep you in the swing of things and fed with Oracle Intelligent Advisor “stuff” here is a nice use case and solution from the Oracle Intelligent Advisor Forum (remember, this is the new address for the forum so bookmark it if you haven’t already done so, and visit it regularly since the notification system doesn’t seem to work very well at the moment). The use case is the following : an entity contains a set of instances, each of which has a date associated with it. The data in these instances might be several dozen, so the consumer of the result wants to have the information grouped by date.

We offered two different ways to do this in the solution. The first is to group them by quarter and present the results “per quarter”. Of course you could adapt this to any kind of period in time. The example used a new entity called the quarter and created the correct quarters by looping through the instances.

Then we can create a relationship to make sure the correct instances are assigned to the quarter

Once we have that, we can sum the data per quarter and present it to the user.

From there it is standard practice to create a repeating group in BI Publisher to display the data in a PDF (you can display it in the interview as well of course).

You can watch the video here to get the details

You can get a copy of the Zip Archive used in the demonstration as well. The full article and our responses can be found here. The second kind of grouping using temporal reasoning is coming soon.