Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.3 and Mapviewer – Step by Step integration – Phase1

Update: Phase2 and Phase3 are available here

I had mentioned in my previous blog entry here that i was working on documenting a step by step approach for the integration between Mapviewer and BI EE. Well, the integration is not pretty much out of the box and involves quite a bit of understanding primarily from the Mapviewer front. So, just be aware that the integration is not out of the box and would require some amount of coding. The entire integration process involves understanding 3 major pieces.

1. Understanding how to pass parameters between Mapviewer and a Dashboard Prompt (Maps must change as we change the prompt).

2. Understanding how we can simulate drill down within a map (This is the harder part that does not involve BI EE).

3. Understanding how one can change the prompts of BI EE as we navigate in a Map.

We will see the first part today as part of a 3-phase series wherein i would try to document this in a step by step fashion. But before i go there, one would have to have these pre-requisites done.

1. Deploy Mapviewer in the OC4J that holds BI EE.

2. Get all the demo setup of Mapviewer up and running. One must be able to view the demo maps that comes along with mapviewer.(This needs a schema called mvdemo that would basically contain all the spatial data in an Oracle Database).

3. A little background of javascript is desired.

If you have all of these pre-requisites then you can try the following. We would be seeing the phase 1 of the integration process. The idea of this integration is to create a dashboard prompt that would basically contain all the cities and based on the city that we select, we must get a map which would show all the customers within that city.

This involves the following steps.

1. Import the table called customers(without the location column) into OBI EE Administration Console. Do the corresponding mapping in BM and the Physical layer.

2. Once this is done. We would have to create a dashboard prompt that would basically list down all the cities and also set a presentation variable called Region based on what we have selected.

As you see above, i have created a dashboard prompt that would basically set a presentation variable called Region.

3. Now lets go to the mapviewer and open up the default demo map called “Array Parameter and Templated Theme Based FOI”.

The map should look like this.

Our idea is to build upon an existing map. The above map basically varies the map based on input city names.

Now lets view the source of the above map and change the source based on our requirements. I have used the following code wherein i have removed unnecessary parts. Remember we would be passing the presentation variable as the URL parameter to the mapviewer. I have added a function called getURLParameter which would basically store the value of the URL parameter in a variable called Region.

Test out whether the URL parameter is getting passed properly to mapviewer. The URL to pass into the mapviewer would look like this http://localhost:9704/mapviewer/fsmc/tutorial/samples/DynarrayThemeBasedFOI.html?Region=OAKLAND

4. The next step is to pass down this Region variable to the mapviewer from the dashboard prompt. We can do that using iframes in a narrative view report. Create a new narrative view report and enter the data as shown below. The iframe URL would be like this http://10.176.246.99:9704/mapviewer/fsmc/tutorial/samples/mapParameter.html?Region=@{Region} where @{Region} is the presentation variable that we had created in step 2.

5. Once this is done, we would have to call the both the reports from a dashboard i.e the Dashboard Prompt report and Narrative report.

I will follow this one up with phase-2 and phase-3 later. But the above should get you started.