OBIEE Blog

Here’s an interesting webinar by BICG group *Christian Screen and Marty Mersinger present*

Please comment if you find other interesting videos

Good evening,

I’ve located some more interesting items from Oracle:

Q:How to remove the empty space between sections in dashboards?

A:To remove the spaces between the reports try the following:

You have to modify the css of the style you apply to the dashboard. In particular to modify the space under the answers you have to modify the portalcontent.css and the views.css

Try to modify the .EmbeddedItem class in the portalcontent.css , and the .ResultsTable in the view.css
You can find this .css in the s_STYLENAME/b_mozilla_4/ folder of you BIEE deploy.

Try to Add or modify to this class:
margin:0px;
padding:0px;

Suggest you to create a new style (the s_ ans sk_).

Q:How to Remove [nQSError: 22047] “The Dimension used in AGO function..”

A: To remove the following error :

Steps to reproduce the error:

1. Create an Answer Request based on (Year, Chg AGO metric)
2. For table view, set Report-Based Total.

The error can be reproduced on any calculation of AGO metric, not only Chg
AGO, for example, AGO Metric + 1.

The error will be gone if we put ANY filter on the Date dimension, for
example Year > 2000.

Detailed error msg:
State: HY000. Code: 10058. [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: HY000] [nQSError: 10058] A
general error has occurred. [nQSError: 22047] The Dimension used in AGO
function must be referenced in the query.

1.Look for instanceconfig.xml under the following path :

* Windows Operating Systems: OracleBIData_HOME\web\config
* Linux Operating Systems: OracleBIData_HOME/web/config

2. Add the following in instanceconfig.xml , restart BIEE instance and re-test :

<ReportAggregateEnabled>true</ReportAggregateEnabled>

Q: How to display session variables in static text View ?

A: Correct syntax in Static View is

Thanks to the Oracle’s support I was able to find answer to my problem. How to make OBIEE more secure and log users off automatically to show users this page:

Here’s what I found:

List the three parameters which affects session timeout for BIEE user.

There are three types of timeout settings controls the user session :

Link 1:

The time of connection between the OracleBI Presentation Server and OracleBI Services can be configured using the following steps:
1. Edit the file instanceconfig.xml
2. Add the following line in the block

<ConnectionExpireMinutes>3</ConnectionExpireMinutes>

3. Restart services OracleBI Presentation Services
Notes:
1. The value of default is 3 minutes.
2. The connection between the OracleBI Server and OracleBI Presentation Services is closed and removed.
3. This setting does not affect the connection established between the OracleBI Presentation Services and the WebBrowser, which remains intact pending an activity from the user.

Link 2:

The time of connection between the OracleBI Presentation Services and the WebBrowser can be configured using the following steps:
1. Edit the file instanceconfig.xml
2. Add the following line in the block ServerInstance) ((/) ServerInstance

<ClientSessionExpireMinutes> 1440</ClientSessionExpireMinutes>

3. Restart services OracleBI Presentation Services
Notes:
1. The internal default value is 1440 minutes (24 hours).
2. The connection between the OracleBI Presentation Services and the WebBrowser is closed and removed.
3. This configuration forces logoff user outside the application, which should make logging into an application to work again.
4. All information and statements in it are lost.

Log User Off:

Then we can set the property to force the user out of the Logoff OracleBI Presentation Services.
This setting only applies to users who have not selected the option “remember my ID and password.
1. Edit the file instanceconfig.xml
2. Add the following line in the block

<LogOnExpireMinutes>180</LogOnExpireMinutes>

3. Restart services OracleBI Presentation Services
Notes:
1. The internal default value is 180 minutes (3 hours).
2. To disable this feature using a value larger than the value of ClientSessionExpireMinutes

Browser performance is a hot topic. I normally develop with Firefox, but from my experience, it’s a rare situation that Firefox is supported by company’s IT department. Hence, I need to use IE on a regular basis – and I can’t say I’m too happy.

I feel like Captain Obvious for re-posting this, but here you go:

IE takes significantly more time than Firefox to open a report.

There are two issues:

1. MacAfee anti-virus software was configured to scan the OBIEE files. As a result, a scan was done on every file when, using IE, which significantly degraded performance. Firefox did not scans any of  the files, and therefore, was much faster.

2. Fundamental differences in the browsers. For example.. IE is built in as part of the OS, while Firefox is standalone.

To minimize the performance differential between IE and Firefox:

First of all, disable virus scanning on any Analytics (OBIEE) folders, and also, the web server folder where cache files are generated.

Secondly, Oracle does recommend any specific settings for either IE or Firefox, however, it is generally acknowledged that Firefox is a faster browser than IE. The explanation for this is that IE is embedded into the OS, whereas Firefox is a standalone application. The effects of this are:

1. Memory Management: IE doesn’t do memory cleanup, because it is done by the OS. Firefox, however, only has to interact with the OS, where it does a better job of managing memory resources, first reserving, and then releasing memory to be reused faster.
2. Network issues: IE being integrated into Windows uses the network settings from Windows, whereas Firefox can more efficiently figure out which settings to use.

Normally, I like to browse through Oracle’s support in search of hidden gems and to get new ideas. This is how I smile when I find solution in the knowledge base for my problem:

I’m also almost used to new flash interface and it doesn’t irk me anymore.

It’s amazing how they deal with all kinds of issues and requests. I’ve found few things I’d like to share today:

How To Concatenate or Merge Amount and Currency Columns?

Your report displays transactions amount and currency in two separate columns. The requirement is to display the amount and currency as one column. For example:
100USD 100EUR etc….

Currently you have a numeric (double) column – Amount, and a second column – currency (alpha code format, such as:USD,EUR,….) in the report. The currency column is placed on the right side of the
amount column, as below:

date | merchant | amount | currency

The currency might be different for each transaction

Currently this cannot not be achieved because when casting the amount to char, in order to concat it with the currency, the 1000s separator is lost (15,321 becomes 15321).  Also when casting the amount to char, the sum agg is no longer available.  Formatting the amount as currency is also not possible because the amount is
of different currencies.
There is an Enhancement Request Bug 8680024 logged to address this matter.

Multiselect Prompt Displays ‘No Choices Available’ When Used With A Presentation Variable

You have configured a dashboard prompt with two columns, where the value selected by the user in the first prompt column is stored in a presentation variable, and the values in the second prompt column depend on
the value in this presentation variable.

When both column prompts are defined as type ‘drop down’ all works fine. The second column correctly displays in the drop down the values. However when the second column prompt control is defined as ‘multi select’, no data is displayed in the prompt. The prompt displays ‘No Choices Available’.

The multi-select prompt column should correctly display values in the prompt as it does when it is defined as a drop down.

This is bug 7571682

There are three possible work-arounds:
1. Click the ‘Go’ button will bring back data
2. Enter a value in the match box and it returns data
3. Use the vanilla constrain option for the dashboard prompts, so you can have column 2 constrained by column 1

Integrating BI Office with OBIEE that has SSO

It is possible to integrate BI Office with OBIEE that has SSO?

BI Office is similar to BI Publisher in integrating with OBIEE that has SSO.

Which is documented in the Oracle® Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Deployment Guide and “Additional Configuration When SSO is Enabled for Oracle BI and BI Publisher” section.

Basically you need to deploy a second saw bridge (analytics.ear) that dedicates for web service calls and bypasses the SSO:
* Locate analytics.ear in the directory OracleBI_HOME/web, deploy and name the new Plug-in analyticsSOAP.  See the Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Installation and Configuration
Guide for more information on Deploying an Ear file on your Web Application Server.
* Locate the Office Server config file (bioffice.xml), update the SawBaseURL property to point the new analyticsSOAP deployed above.
Config file bioffice.xml can be found in the directory OAS_HOME\j2ee\home\applications\bioffice\bioffice\WEB-INF
And the SawBaseURL property should look like this:

http://[host]:[port]/analyticsSOAP/saw.dll

The BI Office add-in would require the user to enter their SSO credentials to login from within Excel or PowerPoint.

Without these steps, and when attempting to login to Excel plugin to OBI\SSO environment, the error message “Unknown error” is likely to occur.