RPDbeginner
Presentation Layer Design & Subject Areas
Explain best practices for organizing the Presentation layer into intuitive subject areas, folders, and columns for business users.
The Presentation layer is the RPD's user experience, and interviewers ask about it to see whether you think about BI from the *consumer's* point of view, not just the modeler's. A technically perfect BMM model can still produce a terrible user experience if the Presentation layer is a disorganized dump of every logical table and column.
It's the difference between a well-organized supermarket with clear aisle signs ("Dairy," "Produce," "Bakery") versus a warehouse where everything is stacked by arrival date — the same products exist in both, but only one lets a shopper find what they need without help.
Key Concepts
1
Good practice organizes each subject area around a business process or analytical domain (e.g., "Sales," "Inventory," "HR Headcount") rather than mirroring the BMM one-to-one — a single BMM can feed multiple, differently-scoped subject areas, and conversely a subject area can selectively expose only some BMM logical tables/columns. Within a subject area, presentation folders (renamed presentation tables) group related columns logically for the business user — grouping by dimension ("Product," "Time," "Region") and by fact grouping ("Sales Measures," "Sales Ratios") rather than by technical structure.
subject areapresentation folders
2
Column and folder naming should use business terminology, not database column names — "Total Revenue" instead of REVENUE_AMT, and hiding technical or ID-only columns that add no analytical value for end users (they can still exist in BMM for join/calculation purposes without being exposed). Custom folders and hierarchical presentation folders can further nest related items (e.g., a "Time" folder containing a "Fiscal Calendar" sub-folder and a "Calendar Year" sub-folder) to reduce visual clutter in large models.
Custom folders and hierarchical presentation folders"Total Revenue"REVENUE_AMT
3
Interviewers sometimes ask candidates to critique a badly-designed subject area (too many columns, cryptic names, no logical grouping) — the ability to articulate *why* it's bad from a business-user usability standpoint, not just a technical standpoint, is what they're listening for.