OBIEE Blog

Customer want to take away from all users ‘My Dashboard’. They want that the users only have the choice between the ‘common Dashboards’.
But the users (the report creators) need My Folders.
So Manage Privileges – Catalog – Personal Storage (My Folders and My Dashboard) does not fit exactly.

Customer has created default shared dashboards that they want the users to see/read by default, but they want to restrict user access to the Shared Dashboard folders.
They want users to be able to access their My Folders directory, but not have access to their My Dashboard link or My Dashboard folders. This is not possible with out of box functionality.

The following enhancement request has been created to benefit the users.

BUG 7665499 – TAKE AWAY FROM ALL OUR USERS ‘MY DASHBOARD’

Solution

The only way to deny access to ‘My Dashboard’ is via the “Personal Storage (My Folders and My Dashboard)” Catalog privilege. Denying this privilege to a group or user will take away access to both ‘My Dashboard’ and ‘My Folders’ – currently, you can’t separate the two. Therefore I have logged the following Enhancement Request.

BUG 7665499 – TAKE AWAY FROM ALL OUR USERS ‘MY DASHBOARD’
Alternatively, here is a suggestion of using current functionality would be:

1. Create a web catalog group and dashboard via “Manage Presentation Catalog Groups and Users” to be used as the default user dashboard.
2. Grant the ‘Everyone’ web group the appropriate privilege to this catalog group via “Manage Presentation Catalog” – e.g. ‘Read’.
3. In the admin tool, create a session init block to set the ‘PORTALPATH’ session variable to the webcatalog path of the default dashboard page.
3.a. You can find the path by looking at the properties of the folder under ‘_portal’ in the catalog group folder the default dashboard was created in – e.g. “/shared/user_default/_portal/Home”.
3.b. The init string could either select the literal path (e.g. select ‘/shared/user_default/_portal/Home’ from dual) so all users would be routed to the same dashboard. Alternatively, the path could be stored externally, e.g. in a table, and selected from it per userid. That way, it would be manageable outside of the admin tool.

This would force all users to the default dashboard specified in the path used to populate PORTALPATH for all users.
One issue that may occur is with existing users that have set their ‘Default Dashboard’ to anything but ‘Default’ in the ‘My Account’ link – they may be required to set it to ‘Default’, then log-off/log-on for the default dashboard setting to take affect.
I know of no way to get around this potential issue for this scenario short of each user making the change OR deleting users from the webcat such that a subsequent logon will ‘re-initialize’ their account (which will then use the init block set PORTALPATH value). Both of these options seem severe, and the second may prove problematic as long as the ‘My Account’ link is still active.

After changing password for OBI repository Administrator user, impersonator and OBIEEConnect HR database user, it is no longer possible to log into OBIEE. The following error is displayed:

‘The page cannot be displayed’

OBIEE 10.1.3.3.0 is installed on Linux and deployed on Oracle 10gAS with SSO implemented

So, when you go to http://servername/analytics, it should bring you to the SSO login page e.g ‘Not logged in’ should be displayed. Instead the above error is displayed.
Cause

The issue is caused by the following setup/step:

a). The Oracle Application Server is unable to render OBIEE as an application

b). Credentialstore.xml has not been updated with the change in impersonator password
Solution

The following resolved the problems

1). Redeploy ‘analytics’ application in the OC4J Admin Console, restart all the OBI processes and attempt to log in again.

Now, OBIEE page displayed ‘Not Logged In..’ which is the expected page as SSO is enabled.

This step is described in

–> Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Installation and Configuration Guide> Configuring Oracle BI Presentation Services > Creating a WAR File for Oracle BI Presentation Services

a.In 0c4j admin console
b. Click on ‘analytics’ application
c. Choose default settings or use existing application files
d. Redeploy application
e. Restart all services

2). Add the change in the impersonator user credentials to the Oracle BI Presentation Services Credential Store. To obtain the impersonator user credentials, Oracle BI Presentation Services will search the credential store for a username-password credential with an alias of impersonation

These steps are documented in

–> Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Deployment Guide > Implementing Single Sign-On Products With Oracle Business Intelligence > Enabling SSO Authentication for Oracle Business Intelligence > Creating the Oracle BI Server Impersonator User

–> Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Deployment Guide > Implementing Single Sign-On Products With Oracle Business Intelligence > Enabling SSO Authentication for Oracle Business Intelligence > Adding Impersonator User Credentials to Oracle BI Presentation Services Credential Store

While running a report, we receive the following error message: State: HY000. Code: 10058. [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: HY000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred. [nQSError: 46073] Operation ‘stat()’ on file ‘/u02/OracleBIData/tmp/nQS_28056_15671_77250638.TMP’ failed with error: (75) (HY000)

Watching the server as the report runs, a large file is created in the /OracleBIData/tmp directory. Once the file hits 2GB in size, the report generates the error. It appears that we are hitting a 2GB file size limitation.

Build:10.1.3.4.0 [1900]
LINUX Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 6) 2.6.9 67.0.7.ELsmp (64-bit)

Please let me know how to resolve this issue. thank you.
Cause
We’ve researched on this error and this issue has been logged as a BUG “BUG 6998143 – ANALYTICS TEMP FILES CANNOT BE LARGER THAN 2GB “.
According to BUG 6998143, in UNIX/LINUX env tmp files over 2 GB in size lead to an error. This bug was fixed for Window env in OBIEE 10.1.3.2, and has been fixed for UNIX/LINUX env in OBIEE 10.1.3.4.

Solution

Please note that a patch for BUG 5543386 – ANALYTICS TEMP FILES CANNOT BE LARGER THAN 2GB, for Linux is now available.

OBI EE and Hyperion Workspace / Smartspace integration was only introduced in EPM 11.1.1 and OBI EE 10.1.3.4.

To be able to have a seemless integration (No OBI EE Login Screen) when navigating from Hyperion Workspace 9.3.1 to OBI EE 10.1.3.4 you have the following options which might meet your implementation requirement: -

1) Use the ‘&NQUser=uuu&NQPassword=ppp’ URL arguments.

These are detailed in the section ‘Incorporating Oracle Business Intelligence Results into External Portals or Applications Using the Go URL’ of the Presentation Server Guide.

2) Enable OBI EE to use SSO. We support any SSO Vendor (SiteMinder, ClearTrust, Oracle SSO, Java SSO, etc…) which supports either HTTP Headers, Server Variables or Cookies.

Please see Chapters 8 and 10 of the Deployment Guide for more information on this area of functionality.

Neither of these options have been designed specifically for Workspace, but they should give you a generic option to implement a solution where no login is required when navigating to OBI EE from Workspace.

3) Just create a custom Init Block and custom session variable. Make the session variable to be initialized with the password. The query for the password initialization would be

SELECT ‘:PASSWORD’ FROM DUAL

Now, go to answers and create a report which would generate the Smartcut link. To this link pass the username (through the USER system session variable) and the password (through the custom session variable above). This will enable seamless login.

4) Enable BI EE to use the Table Authentication method, where usernames and passwords are stored in a database table. Passwords would be stored in encrypted form using obfuscation packages provided with the database.

Then create a report which would generate the Smartcut link. To this link pass the username (through the USER system session variable) and the password (through EVALUATE and a reverse obfuscation package function which would return the password in clearcase) in the report.
Then just use this report in the dashboard for providing the link. This will provide a seamless login.

5) I believe Workspace supports Impersonation. Technical Support have not tested this but it should work if the impersonation is possible. Using the same report approach above pass the Administrator username and password in the URL (these would be static) and also pass the actual BI EE username as the impersonation user in the URL. Provider services and Essbase JAPI support impersonation. We assume Workspace should support that as well. But of course, if its not supported then this would not work. Please liaise with Hyperion Technical Support or a Consultancy Department like Expert Services to look into this option further.

The above options are only supplied as possible workarounds, but Technical Support highly recommends that you upgrade to Hyperion Workspace 11.1.1 so you can leverage the built-in integration functionality.

Is it possible to refer repository variables in filters of conditional formatting?

Solution

Can use presentation variables only for filters in conditional formatting as per the following bookshelf guide:

Oracle Business Intelligence Answers, Delivers, and Interactive Dashboards User Guide > Basics of Working with Requests in Oracle BI Answers > Using Variables to Display Values in Request Results, Dashboards and iBots

Turned out to be a bug.

Workaround using Bins:

Say you had a dollars measure column in your request. And you wanted to add a conditional formatting to set it to green if it was greater than or equal to repository variable repvar1:
- Create a duplicate column dollars in the request and name it dollars_duplicate.
- Set the column format for dollars_duplicate to hidden
- Set the custom heading for dollars_duplicate column formula to ‘dollars_duplicate’
- Create a bin e.g. ‘b1′ based on a filter condition where dollars_duplicate is >= repvar1 – Then go to your required column e.g. dollars and add conditional formatting based on dollars_duplicate column. And in the filter condition set it to the bin name ‘b1′ and specify the ‘edit format’ as green in colour.

You can similarly add all the required conditions as bin condition first and then reference the respective bin name for conditional formatting.