Introduction
Mobile computing is gaining ground rapidly in the Business Intelligence community. As a BI tool mobile devices like the Apple iPad are very appealing to the user community for demonstrating their reports/presentations on the go. The iPad & iPad2 have some hardware and software specifications that can make Oracle Business Intelligence development difficult. Issues like usability, overall look and feel, scrolling, browser rendering and even issues displaying graphs due to no Flash. This post will explain the major pitfalls and how to work around them to deliver the best OBIEE Dashboards possible.
This document will include iPad and iPad2 compliancy for OBIEE 10g.
The Apple iPad & iPad2 – Know Your Device
For the purposes of this document the specifications will be written for the iPad2 and where a difference is between the iPad and iPad2 it will be explained and resolved.

iPad/iPad2 Hardware specifications relevant to OBIEE Reporting
- Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n) and optional 3G module. It’s assumed that the Ipad/Ipad2 being used for demonstration has a basic network latency of at least 50Kbit/sec.
- Display resolution of 1024×768. (In portrait it’s 768×1024, landscape it’s 1024×768).
- Processor:
- IPad1 contains the A4 1Ghz single core processor; 256MB PoP (Package on Package) memory, Graphics Processing Unit built into the chip;
- IPad2 contains the A5 1Ghz dual core processor; 512MB PoP Memory, GPU built in;
Both are adequate for report rendering.
- Location Services:
- The Wi-Fi only model uses an approximation approach to returning the latitude/longitude of the device in use;
- The Wi-Fi & 3G models use Assisted GPS and 3G for more accurate latitude/longitude results.
This could be useful for gathering stats on user location when running reports but outside the scope of this post.
Software Specifications
- Accessibility Support
- Support for playback of closed-captioned content;
- VoiceOver screen reader;
- Full-screen magnification; and
- White on Black display
- Built in support for document types:
- .jpeg, .tiff, .gif (image types);
- .doc and .docx (word files);
- .ppt & .pptx (powerpoint);
- .htm/html;
- .key (keynote), .numbers (numbers), .pages (pages), .pdf (Preview and Adobe Acrobat)
- .txt (text); .rtf (rich text);
- .vcf (contact card);
- .xls and .xlsx (excel);
- Does not support Adobe Flash files/plugin
Safari Browser & why we don’t need a custom application from the App Store
The Apple iPhone/iPad community is used to downloading an application for most things. If someone needs a free game for entertainment they can search for and download a wide variety of choices. These applications are developed “natively” for the iPhone/iPad using Apple’s proprietary programming frameworks and languages (Objective-C for example).
It’s a common misconception that we need to download a special Oracle application to show OBIEE dashboards on an iPad. We simply need a web browser and a network connection so the iPad can browse the OBIEE server and open the dashboards much like a normal user does.
The iPad/iPad2 has the Safari browser pre-installed as part of the iOS package.
For the purposes of this post the iPad OS version we’re using is iOS 4.3.
OBIEE demo environment
Windows 7 Professional Virtual Machine, OBIEE 10.1.3.4.1, Sample Sales XML/RPD installed.
Desktop Machine Screenshot

iPad Screenshot

Aas you can see, the iPad/iPhone devices don’t support Adobe Flash so the default chart rendering option isn’t working.
Chart Solutions
The OBIEE 10g platform provides a java charting tool which renders the charts in Flash (default), SVG, PNG and JPEG formats. The Flash rendering provides for interactivity like drilling down, zooming etc.
Apple doesn’t support Adobe Flash on it’s mobile devices – flash will not work. SVG also didn’t appear to be supported by Safari.
To work around this you will need to adjust your instanceconfig.xml file to render the charts in an alternative format lke PNG or JPEG.
(It should be noted that the Flash chart can handle larger dataset compared to the other formats. OBIEE reports should be written to return the most compact result set possible for quicker client performance).
See inserted XML towards the bottom of the instanceconfig.xml screenshot

After Adjusting Charts to render in PNG format – iPad

Success!!
I will add some more posts on dashboard formatting for “best fit” and other helpful tips for iPad and iPhone.