OBIEE Blog

How can we get the Prompt values to be displayed when the report is exported in MS Office formats or printed in PDF using the ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ report links?

When you use the ‘Printer Friendly’ option on the Dashboard, all objects on the Dashboard get downloaded for printing including the Dashboard Prompt section.

However using the report ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ link, this does not print the Dashboard Prompt section.
Please note this is expected behavior. Using the Printer Friendly icon at the lower lefthand corner, it prints the entire dashboard. Alternatively the ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ link option is available, for the report. So this will print the Compound layout view of the report, or any specific report sections that have been made available on the Dashboard.

A workaround to have the Dashboard Prompt values displayed when you use the Report ‘Download’ or ‘Print’ link is by having the filter view as part of the report.

Oracle has now raised the Enhancement Request# 8242921 to address this matter. The enhancement request is to enhance the product so that so there is also an option to download to the various formats at the dashboard page level. Similar to the Dashboard Page ‘printer friendly’ functionality.

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

This is a post for fellow OBIEE consultants with an interest in Oracle’s acquisitions. Today, I received a letter where Oracle announced they’re acquiring Primavera. This is a very curious news. According to the letter – Primavera is a recognized leading choice for mission critical PPM solutions and helps more than 5,000 global customers and over 2.5 million users propose, prioritize, select, plan, manage, and control complex projects. The interesting thing is that the Project Portfolio Management solution that they’re offering could be replaced with Oracle’s BI Suite. I think Oracle made this acquisution for customer base, not for the product itself. I preditct that they will support Primavera’s products for a few years, but slowly persuade clients to switch to OBIEE. This might mean more projects for us in the future as well as a broader OBIEE installation base.