OBIEE - Line Breaks

Customer asked for line breaks in analysis. This was basically covered before for example here by obiee10grevisited.blogspot.com but I felt it needs so more examples.

(done in OBIEE 11.1.1.7.140527)

Lets create a simple Analysis with 2 column, on of them the string I want line breaks in. The mark for line breaks in OBIEE is <br>. So my formula is: 'Hello<br>people'

This is the formula:

To force <br> to work we will set the text to be HTML in Data format:

Now we see it's working:

You might want the line break to work in the header as well. In that case, select the “contains HTML Markup” in Formula (or in Column Properties->Column Format) :

I was very much surprised to see the export and printing options handling this well not only in HTML output, but also in PDF:

In case your data does not contain <br> you can always use the replace function.

For example:

Replace('Hello !! People','!! ','<br>')

Special characters in data should work as well:

Replace('Hello'|| CHAR(13) ||'People',CHAR(13),'<br>')

 

 This kind of columns might cause some problems in Graph legends.