Brown Bag Topics

• A Brief Primer on String Functions (June 22,2023)

Quick links

• New Alma Analytics UI info

Below is a collection of videos, and text notes of tip, tricks and techniques learned over the years.  Many were originally recorded in Shockwave, and were been re-recorded in September 2018.  These, and future videos will be delivered through YouTube, and stored locally (for U of M staff only) on the departmental drive at Alma Tips and Tricks.

Known issue with Physical Items subject area

Nichole Chisholm asks:
"When I add the "Fund Ledger"."Fund Ledger Code" field, the "Physical Item Details"."Num of Loans (In House + Not In House)" field goes blank. Is this a known problem?"

This is a known issue and is not fixable (because of the convoluted way that Ex Libris has implemented this. Ex Libris does announce it, though in a slightly unusual way. If you mouse-over (not click) the empty folder named "Fund Information">"-- Fund Instructions --", the message explains the limitations of the whole Fund Information dimension. Particularly, it states 'The measures (yellow fields) from folder 'Physical Item Details' should not be used with (anything) from folder 'Fund Information.' If you try this, you will get incorrect results'

As for workarounds, the most obvious would be to run two reports and then merge them via post processing. A little more tricksy, but also open to possible flaws, is taking advantage of the relatively few funds that are involved, and create separate reports for each fund.  I use that report as a "feeder". Then in a report named "output" I take the barcodes reported from 'feeder' and report out the circulation. It generates four separate reports, but at least you won't have to do post-processing.

Filtering within a measure in Alma Analytics

select case when month (current_date) > 6 then
  concat( 'FY-', cast((year(current_date)+1) as char))
else
  concat( 'FY-', cast(year(current_date) as char))
end
from {Subject Area} (e.g. "Funds Expenditure")

Regular Expressions

Semi-colons in Regular Expression

In using regular expressions to identify subject headings, Stacie ran into this issue:

• This  regular expression works:
  EVALUATE('REGEXP_INSTR(%1,''Illegal\saliens.{2}United\sStates--'')',"Bibliographic Details"."Subjects")
• This throws an error:
  EVALUATE('REGEXP_INSTR(%1,''Illegal\saliens.{2}United\sStates;'')',"Bibliographic Details"."Subjects")
• So does this:
  EVALUATE('REGEXP_INSTR(%1,''Illegal\saliens.{2}United\sStates\;'')',"Bibliographic Details"."Subjects")

The problem, of course, is that pesky semi-colon, which OBIEE sees as a delimiter, and there's not an easy way to escape it out (as you've found). My solution is to bypass this with:

EVALUATE('REGEXP_INSTR(%1,''Illegal\saliens.{2}United\sStates''||chr(59))',"Bibliographic
Details"."Subjects")

using the CHR() function to pass through the semi-colon.