OBIEE 12c – Change the default 25 rows per page setting

Here’s how to change the default setting of 25 rows on a table and pivot table in OBIEE analyses when setting a report to Content paging.  

Yes, you can set it when you change the report to content paging, but this often gets forgotten, or you may want change to defaults for many reports that have already been created without having to edit each report individually.

To make it clear, this is what we are talking about – the ‘Rows 1 – 25’ with up/down/all icons at the bottom of a table or pivot table:

This setting is controlled by two tags in the instanceconfig.xml file, which can be located at <obiee_home>/user_projects/domains/bi/config/fmwconfig/biconfig/OBIPS/instanceconfig.xml

You will need to make two changes to this file, one each for tables and pivot tables.

Edit this file in a text editor and locate the <Table> and <Pivot> tags:

Note, this screenshot displays the default out the box contents of the instanceconfig.xml file, your file may have other tags already within these sections.

In here you need to add two more entries for the <MaxVisibleRows> and <DefaultRowsDisplayed> tags:

<MaxVisibleRows>50</MaxVisibleRows>

<DefaultRowsDisplayed>50</DefaultRowsDisplayed>

You can set the number to be anything you want for the default number of rows displayed, although I wouldn’t make it ridiculous…setting it to 10000 will just cause memory/display problems for your browser.  The numbers must however be the same. If they are different OBIEE will take the lower of the two numbers as the new default.

You must also include both entries, if one is missing it will default to 25 and as that will probably be lower than the entry you have included, 25 will remain the default in the reports.

Add these two lines within both <Table> and <Pivot> sections. If you only add it to one, the other will remain at the default 25 rows.

You then need to restart the presentation services component (or simply restart all of OBIEE, whichever is easier for you), then simply re-open your report:

You can still override this setting with the rows per page in the view properties window for individual reports if desired.

I’ve done this in OBIEE 12c, version 12.2.1.3, but I suspect it will probably work in previous 12c versions and possibly 11g as well.

Enjoy!