Prior to 17.04 release this is how preferences menu look like from the web studio.
Now after 17.04 release, there is another tab..
Mbean is where you change FR server preferences that will impact all of your FR reports. In this release Oracle just brought three preferences out of more than 60 FR preferences available on premise. And they are...
You can find all about them here, now I'll quickly show how MissingValuesAreZeroInFormulas preference work (which I think is important especially if you use complex formulas in your FR report). So the default setting is false as shown above, and here is a simple report with two data rows (with and without data) and some straight forward formulas.
As you can see, the formulas for addition and subtraction are working just fine, but the multiplication is returning error instead of zero assuming #missing equals zero (which is how a lot of consultants perceive them.
Now if you change the setting directly form the Web Studio client (Reporting Web Studio-> File -> Preferences) and set it to true.
And the report is looking like this....
Instead of #ERROR now we have #ZERO, which makes a huge difference in some cases! and that's about it, you can easily change the values and the no need to logout or refresh the POD or anything.
May the Cosmos be with you!
