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.

WebCenter Spaces OBIEE Integration

This post is more of a self-reference material for the future. Thought it might help others looking for it as well.

Wouldn't it be a great idea for enterprises which already have WebCenter Spaces & OBIEE technologies to leverage the integration feature? Yes, think about showing BI analytics to your business users / stakeholders through the WebCenter spaces portal solution.

There are a set of configurations that needs to be done at both OBIEE and the WebLogic server level to enable single sign-on for seamless integration. A very good detailed step-by-step instruction on achieving the integration is documented here.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/portal/learnmore/wc-biappsconfig-396418.pdf

Oracle ADF BI Integration

This blog post will guide through the process of embedding OBIEE analytics (reports/dashboards) on an ADF application. Also hoping that this resource will act as a reference material for future.

There are multiple ways in which we can achieve BI integration with ADF. The illustrated version on this post is one that I found very sophisticated.

The reasons for OBIEE integration could be manifold. The default DVT features available within ADF can be used to build reports however not as sophisticated as BI does. In such cases, it would be a great time-saver plus a great way to show analytics to the user on a jspx page.

In a more interesting use case, I have used this feature within a BPM process user task - where the reviewer/approver can see the BI analytics on the UI along with process parameters before taking an action.

Products/Versions:

JDeveloper/ADF: 11.1.1.6
OBIEE: 11.1.1.5

Step 1: Download the following JDev extensions

1	bi-adf_bundle	Provides the ability to browse the BI Catalog through the JDeveloper resource catalog and add BI objects to an ADF page.
2	bi-adf-taskflow-extension_bundle	Provides the ability to browse the BI Catalog through the WebCenter resource catalog and add BI objects to a webCenter page.
3	bi-soap-cn_bundle	Provides the ability to create a BI Soap Connection.
4	bi-vo_bundle	Provides the ability to create a View Object that can query Oracle BI using logical SQL.
5	oracle.webcenter.customization_bundle	Provides design time capabilities for the WebCenter Customization Framework.
6	oracle.webcenter.framework_bundle	Provides design time capabilities for the WebCenter Framework and Services.

Links for download:

http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@otn/documents/webcontent/131167.xml
http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@otn/documents/webcontent/156082.xml

I know it is a quite a list - but can't get away from this :)

Step 2: Install these extensions to your JDeveloper

Help -> Check for Updates... -> Choose "Install From Local File" option, select the extensions one-by-one and let JDeveloper install them. JDeveloper will prompt for restarts for every extension install.

Step 3: After installing all the BI extensions, under the "Application Resources" panel of the ADF application (where you want to integrate the OBIEE reports), right click on the "Connections" -> "New Connection" -> "BI Presentation Services..."

Step 4: Provide the OBIEE analytics environment information in the wizard and proceed to complete connection creation. If you have not enable 'impersonation' in BI, change this option to 'false' in the following screen. Ensure that the connection is successfully established to the BI server.

Step 5: Now, this connection should appear automatically in the "IDE Connections" panel under the "Resource Pallete". This can be used to browse through the BI analytics for available dashboards/reports.

Now that the BI presentation services is available, all that remains is integrating the available BI reports into the ADF page

Step 6: First step towards ensuring that the ADF project is BI technology enabled. To do this, right click on the ADF project -> Project Properties

Under "Technology Scope" option ensure that the "Business Intelligence ADF View Components" is selected.

Step 7: We are almost there! Browse through the BI presentation services catalog from under the "Resource Pallete", drag & drop the required reports on to the ADF page.

Common Impediments & Resolutions:

I1: Unable to drag & drop the reports to ADF page

Resolution: Initially I was not able to drag and drop the BI reports on to the ADF page successfully. I had to manually include the following element to my ADF page source to force ADF to recognize the BI reports;

<adfbi:content id="content1" value="#{bindings.biExecBinding1}"/>

After doing this the BI technology binding was enabled on my ADF project. Then I removed the element which I added manually.

I2: At runtime, OBIEE reports were not displayed. The following error was reported on the ADF page;

Unable to connect to the BI Presentation Server. Please ensure that it is running, configured properly, and that the connection details within this application are correct.Please check the log file for more details.

The server logs reported the following error;

Cannot lookup the connection, BI using fallbacks[[
oracle.bi.presentation.soap.connection.BISoapException: No credentials found for this connection - please check that your connection credentials were deployed properly.
at oracle.bi.presentation.soap.connection.impl.BaseBISoapConnection.setReference(BaseBISoapConnection.java:216)
at oracle.bi.presentation.soap.connection.impl.RTBISoapConnection.(RTBISoapConnection.java:58)
at oracle.bi.presentation.soap.connection.BISoapConnectionFactory.getObjectInstance(BISoapConnectionFactory.java:715)
at oracle.adf.share.jndi.ReferenceStoreHelper.getObjectForReference(ReferenceStoreHelper.java:295)

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

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at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.execute(WebAppServletContext.java:2179)

at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletRequestImpl.run(ServletRequestImpl.java:1490)

at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:256)

at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:221)

Resolution: To resolve this error, ensure that the "Credentials" option is unchecked under the "Security Deployment Options" of the "Application Properties".

This config ensured that the credentials are not overwritten and are picked up from the cwallet.sso file under the EAR package. The issue was resolved and the BI reports were displayed on the ADF page as expected.

Write back if you have any thoughts/suggestions/clarifications :)