OER (Oracle Enterprise Repository) Reporting Feature (BI Publisher)

Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) provides total control and manageability of all your SOA assets and also tracing the relationships between various services, business processes and other assets in your enterprise.

By SOA governance through OER, you can gain greater visibility into your SOA assets, reduce redundancy, track usage, credit projects that reuse assets thereby promote reuse of the same - resulting in cost savings & better maintenance.

One of the core features of any SOA governance product is the support to render various reports;

In order to enable OER reports, you will need to have BI publisher installed which will augment detailed analytic & reporting capability to OER. Without this, OER reports screen will display the following message;

Please set the system setting for Report Server URL. Reports cannot be run until this has been properly set.

Once BI publisher is installed, perform the following configurations to enable OER reporting;

Configure BI Publisher with OER:

1. Stop BI Publisher server
2. In the OER server install, Extract the 11.1.1.7.0-OER-BIP11gReports.zip file [This zip file can be found under <OER_HOME>/core/tools/solutions/reports]
3. Copy "OER" folder from the "Oracle" folder (Assuming the install is on Oracle DB - else copy OER folder from appropriate DB folders that are supported) into the following BI publisher directory;

<BIDomain>/config/bipublisher/repository/reports

4. Start the BI Publisher server and verify whether the OER folder is shown under the "Shared Folders" by visiting the following URL;
http://<hostname>:<port>/xmlpserver

Configure OER JDBC Data Source:

1. Login to BI Publisher as admin user (eg. weblogic)
2. Click on the "Administration" tab

3. Under the "Data Sources" section, choose "JDBC Connection"

4. Click on "OER" data source and ensure that BI Publisher can successfully connect to OER

Configuring the Reporting settings on OER:

1. Login to OER as admin user and click on "Admin" tab

2. Click on "System Settings" in the left admin panel

3. In the "Search" text box, type "report" - This will automatically filter the setting results and show only the "Reports" section

4. Ensure that the following properties are set properly

• Enable Reports - True
• Report Server URL - http://<hostname>:&lt:port>/xmlpserver/OER
• Report Server Endpoint URL - http://<hostname>:&lt:port>/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService
• Report Server Username: admin (user to connect to BI Publisher server)
• Report Server Password: password for admin user

5. Save the settings

Now, go back to the "Reports" page in OER and enjoy generating reports. There are many out-of-box reports that OER provides. You can also create custom reports in BI publisher and make them available in OER - That will be a topic for my next post :)

If you want to enable single sign-on between OER & BI Publisher, then you will have to create a OER user on BI Publisher server and assign the BI groups (OER_Reports) to this user. You will have to then configure this user under the OER reports section for seamless access.

Solving BPM PS6 (11.1.1.7) Webform Rendering Issue

When the server host name is not properly set during SOA installation, BPM picks up the default server URL while rendering webforms. This could cause rendering issue since webform expects full server hostname (localhost or short server hostname will not render the webform content).

Check out here for further configuration required for BPM PS6 WebForms...

Often the easier fix would be to manually update the host name in the enterprise manager for each of the human tasks in the BPM process. But that could be time consuming especially if you have many human tasks in your process and redo this every time you redeploy the process.

To have a permanent fix in place so that all human task webforms in future use the fully qualified hostname, set the FusionAppsFrontEndHostUrl property in your soa-infra as shown below;

1. Login to EM console as administrator (eg. weblogic)

2. Expand SOA, Right-Click on soa-infra -> choose SOA Administration -> Workflow Properties

3. In the resulting "Workflow Notification Properties" screen click "More Workflow Notification Configuration Properties..."

4. Enter the required fully qualified URL in the "FusionAppsFrontEndHostUrl" property in the following format;
*=http://hostname:port

5. Click on "Apply" and save the settings.

Henceforth, all BPM deployments would make use of the FusionAppsFrontEndHostUrl to render the forms.