Globally disable chart animations in OBIEE 11g

Chart animations look great when you first start using them, but you can go off them after a while, especially if you have many of them. It’s possible to disable the animation for individual charts – by deselecting the ‘Animate graph on Display’ option in the Graph Properties window. This is fine for developing new charts, but if you’re upgrading an OBIEE 10g installation with many graphs this can become a major task.

There’s no official option in OBIEE to globally disable the animation, but with a bit of playing around with generic ADF/DVT chart settings (as used in JDeveloper) I’ve come across a setting which will do the trick.

A small change is required to the dvt-graph-skin.xml file.

This is located in middlewarehome\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\web\msgdb\s_blafp\viewui\chart\ and as noted on other blogs can be edited to remove the drop shadow effect on charts and to alter the default chart colours. Well another setting will turn off animations.

Simply add the parameter animationDuration ="0" to the <Graph> tag at the beginning of the file, then restart the presentation services. This parameter simply reduces the time the animation runs for to zero milliseconds, effectively turning off the animation. You could experiment with different numbers to speed up or slow down the animations if your that way inclined…

Below is an example of the file with the drop shadow removal (visualEffects="NONE") and alternate chart colours (<SeriesItems> tags):

<Graph visualEffects="NONE" animationDuration="0">

<SliceLabel>
<!-- decimalDigitUsed is false here so that non-percentage pie slices do not pick up this value
The DVTChartProcessor sets decimalDigitUsed to true if this is a percentage pie slice -->
<ViewFormat decimalDigit="2" decimalDigitUsed="false"/>
</SliceLabel>
<Title>
<!-- attributes supported - fontColor="#0", bold="true", italic="true", underline="true" -->
<GraphFont fontColor="#0" bold="true"/>
</Title>
<SeriesItems>
      <Series id="0" color="#A4D5F9" borderColor="#A4D5F9"/>

      <Series id="1" color="#5592D0" borderColor="#5592D0"/>

      <Series id="2" color="#EFD084" borderColor="#EFD084"/>

      <Series id="3" color="#687FA1" borderColor="#687FA1"/>

      <Series id="4" color="#CFC4E5" borderColor="#CFC4E5"/>

      <Series id="5" color="#8D9EB7" borderColor="#8D9EB7"/>

      <Series id="6" color="#5898AA" borderColor="#5898AA"/>

      <Series id="7" color="#CEE4EA" borderColor="#CEE4EA"/>

      <Series id="8" color="#90B5D1" borderColor="#90B5D1"/>

      <Series id="9" color="#F6E795" borderColor="#F6E795"/>

      <Series id="10" color="#C7C1C1" borderColor="#C7C1C1"/></SeriesItems>   

</Graph>