Oracle Data Visualization Desktop has a lot of useful features that you might not know about on first inspection, so in this blog I will run through what Data Actions are, and the clever ways they can be used in your own projects.
A data action enables you to link a visualization with an URL, move to another page in your project or to another project all together. Data Actions can also be used on any visualization, or restricted to specific visualizations. Filters can also be passed through a Data Action from one canvas to another.
URL Data Actions
Create a visualization, select the Canvas Settings icon in the top right and select Data Actions.
Click the + icon in the Data actions menu, check type to be URL and enter the URL you want to link your visualization to.
Now if you right click onto your visualization, you’ll see your data action on the menu. Click this and you’ll be brought to your desired URL.
Canvas Data Actions
Create a new data action this time with a Type of Canvas. Anchor the data action to the attribute Exercise, leave Project as This Project, select Canvas 2 from Canvas and leave Pass Values as All.
As you can see from the below screenshot, there are two visualizations on Canvas 1 but only from Distance by Exercise are we able to use the newly created Data action. This is because Exercise was anchored in our data action, meaning only visualizations which contain this attribute will have the associated data action visible.
Right click on Swimming in the top visualization and select Canvas Data Action from the menu the data action fires and we are brought to Canvas 2.
Since Pass Values was set to All, it means that Canvas 2 is now filtered by Swimming, as this is where the data action was fired from. Had Pass Values been set to none there would not have been a filter applied to Canvas 2.