One place to find all reports at our organization
At our college, we use a few different tools for our data products: Tableau Online, Tableau on-premise, Cognos, PDFs, and Oracle APEX. We needed a centralized location to direct all employees to for finding these data products that are easily searchable.
To solve this, we created what we call “The Data Portal” in Oracle APEX as a repository of data products. When a user logs in, they’ll see recommended reports based on their role and department. A user can favorite reports to find them faster next time. If a user does not know what to search for, we have easy navigation with some key tags in the “Browse” section.
Each data product has a details page that gives details about the report including the steward and a preview image. This page can also take the user to the report, hosted in whatever system it resides. This is an important point: no data products are hosted in the data portal, it simply directs to the report itself. The portal also does not have permissions so everyone can see every data product but when they try to open the report, they may not have permissions.
The Data Portal’s main capability is that it is a basic search engine through our data products. The search is accomplished through searching many sections of the product detail: tags, the report title, and the report description. Results are sorted using a scoring mechanism that ensures that the more important or trusted data products are listed at the top.
Any team can contribute data products to the portal so that it can truly be a comprehensive source. This then makes it easy to point new employees to this tool as their one-stop shop.
Using Oracle APEX, a low code development tool, allowed us to easily build most of this functionality with out-of-the-box capabilities.
Future development we’d like to do:
- Improve UI
- Use ML for recommending relevant data products
