One very good feature that BI EE does not have currently is the ability to send prompted dashboards to users via iBots. Currently, iBots can only send filtered reports but not dashboards. Lets look at an approach today to send prompted dashboards to end users. Use this approach only if you have no other option. Using the approach one can send the dashboards only in HTML format (PDF would not work). Let us start with the Brand Analysis Dashboard Page that we have in the Paint Dashboard. This page contains 4 prompts and a number of reports. Lets choose some values in all these prompts and run the reports like the one shown below

Our aim is to send this page(with the prompt values that we have chosen) via delivers. In order to achieve this lets start with create a Bookmark link to the page. If you are not sure what Bookmark link does, check my previous blog entry here. This bookmark link would give us a dashboard page with the same prompt values that we applied above. Now save this link. Then go to answers and create a simple report. Include a dummy column with the below formula

CASE WHEN 1=0 THEN Markets.Region ELSE 'Dummy' END

This is to ensure that the report does not throw out any error. Now, go to the narrative view of this report and enter the below iframe html code.

<iframe name="FRAME1" src="http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard&_scid=7o5ZDhJ66E8&PortalPath=%2Fshared%2FPaint%20Demo%2F_portal%2FPaint%20Dashboard&Page=Brand%20Analysis&PageIdentifier=fnf5lc54aacnlbjt&BookmarkState=g2jqaprha457gslanpmc0db2de&nquser=Administrator&nqpassword=welcome1" width="830" height="860" frameborder="0" ></iframe>

In the above iframe, replace the src= attribute with the bookmark link that you saved in the previous step. Also, ensure that you are adding nquser and nqpassword parameters as shown above. Now, in the compound layout of this report just have this narrative view. Save this report. Now go to delivers and schedule an ibot to send this report to end users. Ensure that you are sending the content only as HTML.

Now, your end users would be receiving the prompted dashboards via delivers.

Not the best solution, but can be used in certain cases where the requirement is an absolute must. One can add more customizations to this by choosing a single bookmark page from multiple pages.

I was working with the BI EE and Essbase connectivity today and came across another important feature that would let an user to analyze any dimension members as Type 1 or Type 2. If you had gone through my previous blog entry here, i would have briefly explained what Type 1 and Type 2 actually mean. By default, when you import an Essbase cube, all the measures within an Account dimension would be imported as flat-list (with no hierarchy). This kind of an import is called as Type 1. For example, consider that we have a cube/database containing 2 dimensions LOB and YEAR. And we have a third dimension ACCOUNT containing the AMOUNT measure, then the TYPE 1 Essbase cube would be treated as shown below

DIMENSION LOB                     DIMENSION YEAR                     AMOUNT

As you see, in Type 1 we are losing out on the measure hierarchy if any. One of the very good advantages of Essbase is that it treats all the dimensions(including an ACCOUNT dimension) as the same i.e one can use any dimension as a scenario dimension from a reporting standpoint. Now, the question is how do we leverage that from within BI EE. i.e Basically we would like to use the months in the YEAR dimension as a scenario dimension and keep the account dimension intact. If you are not sure what i mean, below screenshot is what i need. The idea is to have the months in the reporting as a column header for all the analysis that i would be doing. In such a case, it is as though we are having as many AMOUNT measures as the number of MONTHS.

In order to achieve the above, there are a couple of changes that we would have to do in the physical layer of the Admin tool. Double click on the cube and navigate to hierarchies. Double click on the Accounts Dimension and change the dimension type to Other (instead of Measure Dimension).

Similarly, change the Year Dimension type from Other to Measure Dimension.

This will flatten out the Year Dimension. Now, remove the AMOUNT measure column from the cube and manually create 3 columns (each matching the attribute value names of the dimension members) as shown below

Now, recreate the BM and physical layer. Now you would be able to create reports as shown above in the 2nd screenshot

The above should give you an idea of how to go about converting your hierarchical members into flattened measure columns.

Well, it looks like the wait is over and 10.1.3.3.3 version of BI EE has been released. You can download it from here and the documentation is here. Unfortunately, there is not even one new major feature that has been added to BI EE. But BI Publisher has some good new features. Below is the quote from the New Features guide.

Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Version 10.1.3.3.3 contains no new features.

However, Oracle BI Publisher Version 10.1.3.3.3 contains new features. For more information about the new Oracle BI Publisher features, refer to the Oracle Business Intelligence New Features Guide Version 10.1.3.3.3.

Tim has already blogged about the new features of BI Publisher here. On a high level, below are the new features that have been added to BI Publisher.

1. JDBC DataDirect drivers for DB2 (v8.1,v9.1), MS SQL Server (2000,2005), Oracle (9i, 10g) are now bundled in BI Publisher 10.1.3.3.3

2. New option to enable/disable the “Link to this Report” link in every report.

3. Support for Pagination in RTF Output and more

4. Support for multiple cascading parameters.

5. Support for vertical alignment of external graphics

6. Support for multiple currency symbol display in reports

I have a hunch that 10.1.3.3.3 might have some critical bug fixes especially surrounding BI EE - Essbase connectivity. Let me play around more with this release to find out what more has been added/fixed.

Well, this is what the otn BI EE download page gave me today.

10.1.3.3.3 version is about to be released in another 8 to 10 hours(hopefully). I believe this is more of a patch release with some bug fixes. Lets wait and see what new features/bug fixes are being bundled into this release.

As i had written previously here, one of the methods of loading Essbase cubes is by using the Hyperion Data Integration Management and its corresponding Essbase Adapter. In that blog entry i had written about the capabilities of Hyperion DIM product (which is nothing but Informatica underneath). Today, lets see how we can go about loading a simple Essbase Cube using the Essbase Adapter. In order to load an Essbase Cube(using the Essbase Adapter) we would have to be aware of 3 different loading mechanisms that are specific to Hyperion DIM. They are

1. Type 1 - Here, all the dimensions are treated normally and the measures are treated as different columns. One would have to have a seperate column populating the lowest level for each dimension and a seperate column for each of the measures. For example, our source should table should look like this

In this case, our fact table has 3 dimension keys CITY, PRODUCT and MONTH. And, we also have 2 more columns SALES and COGS where both of them correspond to measures. If you have data in this format then use this load technique to load the data into the Essbase Cube/Database.

2. Type 2 - Here all the dimensions are treated normally and the measures are populated in a single column. And the different measures are identified by another column. For example, our source table populating the cube should look like this.

As you see above, our fact table has 4 dimension keys CITY, PRODUCT, MONTH and ACCOUNT. We have only one measure and the type of measure is identified by the ACCOUNT column. So, if you have source data in this fashion, use Type 2 method to load your Essbase cubes.

3. Type 3 - This is for handling value based hierarchies in the source data. So, if your source data contains data with parent child columns (hierarchy is obtained by traversing the parent child columns) then use the Type 3 method to load your essbase cubes.

In our example, lets start with loading a simple Essbase cube/database using the Type1 data load method. Our sample cube contains 2 dimensions LOB and YEAR. There is also another ACCOUNT dimension with only one measure AMOUNT. Our fact table contains data in the below shown format

So, import this table into the source. Then import our target Essbase cube (in our case, the dimensions of the cube have already been loaded i.e the essbase cube already has an outline). When you import an Essbase Cube ensure that you are importing it as Type1.

And finally, this is how your final cube would look like within Hyperion DIM.

Now, create a direct one to one mapping between your fact table and your Essbase Cube

Once this is done, just execute the above mapping using the Workflow Manager.

In the session log you can find out how many rows have been loaded and applied. Now, the question is how does this work. Since, we already have the outline defined, what Essbase Adapter does is it checks the lowest levels of each dimension hierarchy and loads the corresponding data from the fact table. And then it builds up the other summaries based on what summarization has been defined for each of the levels.

As you might probably be aware, APEX (Application Express) has support for web services. One can call web services and can create several sequential processes out of them. There can be lots of use cases for these web service calls. One of them is to have a custom integration of BI EE within APEX environment. If you had worked on APEX and BI Publisher integration (using Web Services) as documented here excellently by Tyler Muth you would have noticed that APEX can identify BI Publisher web services out of the box since APEX web services have only a single binding i.e all the methods can be identified by using a single root service. But in the case of BI EE, it produces a multiple binding WSDL. APEX does not support multiple binding web services currently. So, the question is how do we go about calling BI EE methods from within APEX? Thats where a tool called SOAP UI comes to our rescue. I came across this tool while going through Tyler’s blog entry above and found this free tool to be very useful to identify end points of SOAP requests. Till now, i was using another tool called Mindreef SOAPScope. Though mindreef is also good, the major drawback was that they did not give a free version. They only provide you an evaluation copy. Use the SOAP UI tool and create a project using the BI EE WSDL below.

http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?WSDL

If you want you can also include the BI Publisher WSDL to know the difference between a single binding and Multi binding web services.

Now, just to get us started, lets try to authenticate into BI EE using the Logon Method of the SAWSession service and then use that session to execute an ibot by using the excuteIBotnow method of the IBotService from within Application Express. Since APEX, does not support multi binding web services, we would have to treat each and every service (different bindings) of the BI EE WSDL as a seperate WSDL in itself. So, go to an APEX application and click on Shared Components -> Logic -> Web Service References. Now click on create and do not search for the WSDL in the UDDI. In the next step, instead of entering the WSDL click on create Web Service Reference Manually. Remember, we would have to create one reference for each and every web service. Following are the URLs that you would have to use for each service

XMLViewService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=xmlViewService
SecurityService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=securityService
WebCatalogService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=webCatalogService
SAWSessionService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=nQSessionService
JobManagementService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=jobManagementService
ReplicationService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=replicationService
ReportEditingService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=reportService
IBotService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=ibotService
HTMLViewService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=htmlViewService
MetadataService - http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?SoapImpl=metadataService

In our case since we want to authenticate and trigger an ibot, we would have to use 2 services. They are SAWSession service and IBotService. While creating a web service reference for the saw session service, use the below XML (you can obtain this from the SOAP UI tool).

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="<a href="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/</a>" xmlns:v5="com.siebel.analytics.web/soap/v5">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <v5:logon>
         <v5:name>Administrator</v5:name>
         <v5:password>welcome1</v5:password>
      </v5:logon>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

In the above XML, Administrator and welcome1 are the username/passwords for my BI EE instance. If you want you can replace the actual values with #ITEMNAME# to populate them dynamically based on page/application items.

Remember, to enter a collection name for storing the reponse. This is very important since we would have to extract the session id and pass it on to another service. In my case, i had used WSDL_COLLECTION as the name of the collection (Dont worry about creating these collections. These are automatically created. All you need to do is to enter the name. you can get what is stored in the collection by querying the APEX_COLLECTIONS view). Similarly use the below XML for the executeiBotnow method of the IBotService.

 <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:v5="com.siebel.analytics.web/soap/v5">
<soapenv:Header/>
<soapenv:Body>
<v5:executeIBotNow>
<v5:path>/users/administrator/_ibots/Test</v5:path>
<v5:sessionID>#F101_SESSIONID#</v5:sessionID>
</v5:executeIBotNow>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

Here, replace the v5:path tag value with the ibot path that you need to execute. Since session ids are dynamic, we would have to reference an application level item (F101_SESSIONID) which would be populated by the SAWSession service. Again, enter a collection name like WSDL_COLLECTIONSCHED for storing the result. Once these 2 web service references have been created, create a page process to call the Logon Method of the SAWSession service.

Make this service to be conditionally called on the submit of a button (Login Button). Whenever each of the service is called from within APEX, the result is stored in a collection. Since this stores the result of a web service response, it would be stored as a CLOB in the CLOB001 column of the APEX_COLLECTIONS view. Typically the response of the 1st service would be like the one shown below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" xmlns:sawsoap="com.siebel.analytics.web/soap/v5">
<soap:Body>
<sawsoap:logonResult>
<sawsoap:sessionID xsi:type="xsd:string">ihdcqbtmm8q06ii2opb7qhh44npfqh5v0liad5izOr07UFe9W00</sawsoap:sessionID>
</sawsoap:logonResult>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

As you see the sessionid would be embedded in the SOAP response. The most common method to extract the session id is to write a simple XPath query with the corresponding namespaces. But in our case, we would not be doing that since the resultant SOAP response is a constant. So, let write a simple query as shown below to extract the session id from the above XML.

SELECT SUBSTR(DBMS_LOB.SUBSTR(CLOB001,4000,1),392,INSTR(DBMS_LOB.SUBSTR(CLOB001,4000,1),'</sawsoap:sessionID>')-392) FROM APEX_COLLECTIONS WHERE COLLECTION_NAME = 'WSDL_COLLECTION'

Use the above query to populate the F101_SESSIONID application level item. Once this is done, create another page process to call the executeIBot method of the IBotservice. Make this process to be executed after the execution of SAWSessionservice page process. Now this would automatically trigger the ibot.

This should give you an idea of how to go about calling BI EE web services from APEX. Lets look at more complex scenarios lin future blog entries.

As you might probably be aware, JDeveloper 11g Tech Preview 4 is already out for everyone to download. I am not sure how many of you actually noticed this, but in Tech Preview 3 of JDeveloper a new integration between JDeveloper and BI EE was added(Strange that this was not announced anywhere since i found this out by chance) But the problem with that release(not a release per se since it is only a Tech Preview) was it was still buggy at best since the ADF components and BI EE somehow did not work together well (atleast on the instances that i tried). But now that TP4 is out, i thought i would try out the integration again. Alas, this did not work out again!!! There are still some issues with the integration. This blog entry is a compilation of my findings. This integration should give you an idea of how BI EE is going to be integrated into a majority of Oracle’s other suite of products. One can now drag and drop BI EE components like reports, dashboards etc directly into ADF-JSP pages to generate custom pages. For example look at the screenshot below,

As you see above, one can add connections directly to a Jdeveloper instance. That connection can automatically recognize the web catalog components of BI EE. One other very interesting feature is that one can model business components with BI EE as a data source. For example, if you are aware of the BI EE and BIP integration, you can query a report and add a template to that report. On the same lines one can use a BI EE report as a base and then one can add multiple views on top of it. These views will use the JDBC driver of BI EE.

One other very important feature that i noticed was the use of “no authentication” for BI EE reports. If you have worked with BI Publisher or Oracle Portal, you would be aware of the fact that one can expose individual reports/webpages to external users without authentication. Till now BI EE did not have this feature. I was under the impression that this is not available in 10.1.3.3.2 version of BI EE too. But when i looked closely at the integration between BI EE and JDeveloper, i noticed that while rendering BI EE reports there was an usage of a special URL parameter called NoAuthGo for all the reports. This i believe would give the Public Pages/Guest folder feature of Oracle Portal/BI Publisher to BI EE. But when i tried using it directly as below

 http://localhost:9704/analytics/saw.dll?NoAuthGo&path=/shared/Paint%20Demo/Prompts%20Across%20SAs/Report%201

and it gave me the below page

What struck me was the error message.

“If you would like to use this powerful capability, please contact this site’s administrator”

I believe there has to be an undocumented parameter in instanceconfig.xml (most probably under the AUTH tags) to enable this feature. If anyone knows what that parameter is, feel free to share it in the comments section. As far as i see, the integration is based on using the URL parameters which is well in line with my observations here. Excellent piece of integration and still more to come in the coming releases!!!.

If you had gone through my blog entry here, i would have talked about using UDML as a way for automating migration from dev to test/prod environments. But the major problem with UDML is that one cannot update the passwords of Connection Pools, Users etc since the UDML expects them to be encoded. In such a case, for updating passwords alone we can use an undocumented command line switch option for the AdminTool. For example, look at the screenshot below.

This is nothing but the connection Pool property of the ORCL database. Here, we would like to change the schema names and its corresponding passwords. For example, we would like to change the schema to SH and also would like to change the password. In order to do that, open a text editor and enter the below command. Save the file in the same directory as the Admin Tool ({OracleBI}\Server\Bin). If not, then you would have to give the full path of the file.

Open Dev_Machine.rpd Administrator Administrator
SetProperty "Connection Pool" "orcl"."Connection Pool" "User" "sh"
SetProperty "Connection Pool" "orcl"."Connection Pool" "Password" "welcome1"
Save
Exit

Now, open up a command prompt and navigate to {OracleBI}\Server\Bin. Typein in the below command,

 admintool /command commandlineswitch.txt

This would automatically update the connection pool values.

You can use the above to update many objects within the repository. For updating passwords for users, just use the nqschangepassword.exe tool. For more details on this, check my blog entry here. So, on a high level your entire migration process would look as shown below

Thanks to Phil for sharing this.

I got a question the other day with regard to passing dashboard prompt values to multiple reports from different Subject Area’s. The user’s questions was “If i have a dashboard prompt on a column from one subject area, will i be able to restrict the data on a report from another subject area?”. Thought the question is pretty straight forward, i thought this warrants a detailed explanation of how the dashboard prompts work. As always, lets understand this through an example. We shall be using the default Paint and Paint Exec subject areas. Also, as we move along we will build more subject areas to see the impact of a dashboard prompt on 4 different reports from 4 different subject areas. Lets first start with creating a simple dashboard prompt on the year column of the Paint subject area.

Note down the Presentation Table Name and Presentation Column Name of the above prompt. It is “Periods”.”Year”. Now, lets go to the Paint Subject area and create a simple report containing Year and Sales. Ensure that you have a “is prompted” clause filter on the Year column.

Similarly, create the same report using “Periods”.”Year” column and the sales measure column on the Paint Exec subject area. Also add the is prompted clause filter on the year column. Now, put the dashboard prompt and both of the reports in a dashboard page. Now, if you change the year value in the prompt, both the reports would get affected.

Now, you have noticed that both the reports get filtered because the Presentation Table and Presentation Column names for both Paint and Paint Exec Subject areas for the Year column are the same. Now, lets create a copy of the Paint Subject area and rename the Presentation Table of the Year column to something like “Periods New”.

Now, create the same report as shown above i.e Year and Sales report with an “is prompted” clause on the Year column. Add this report to the dashboard. Now, if you notice, the filter would not be applied to the third report.

This would be the typical use case. One would have different subject areas with different names and we would like to apply filter from a dashboard prompt on one column to a report on another column in another subject area. So, in order for the filter to be applicable without changing presentation Table and column names, we have something called as “Aliases”. In our case, add an alias to the Periods New presentation Table with same Presentation Table name of the column that was used in the prompt. In our case it is Periods.

Just by adding the filters, the filters would not be applied. Go back to the 3rd report we created. In the column formula of the year column (this is important. Aliases would not be resolved internally. We would have to put their names in the formula explicitly), change it from “Periods New” to “Periods”. Now you would notice that the filter would be applied on the 3rd report also.

In our example, all our subject areas come from a single BM. What if we have completely 2 different subject areas from 2 different Business Models? The above would work even in that case too. Ensure that your reports refer to the aliased columns instead of their original column names. The below screenshot shows a 4th report (SA from a different BM) filtered using the same technique.

So, in a nut shell, if you want a dashboard prompt filter to be applied to reports sourcing different BM or SA’s you basically would have to add an alias of the dashboard promt column’s Presentation Table name and the Presentation Column name to the report columns. This is not applicable if you are using presentation variables. Aliases are not required if you are filtering reports by presentation variables.

Use this approach only if you have no other options. Also, this would work only if you have non-numeric columns(on which you want to apply conditional formatting). Not an elegant solution but would work neverthless. As the title of this blog suggests we shall be looking at an approach to enable cross column conditional formatting on Pivot Tables. You might probably be aware of the fact that BI EE does not support cross column conditional formatting in Pivot Tables. This is stated very clearly in the New Features Guide here. But what if your end user somehow wants this feature. In such a case, just follow the below mentioned procedure. Lets start with a simple Pivot table report as shown below

The above report gives a report on the Region, Brand and their corresponding sales. Now, our aim is to highlight all the Regions in Red whose Brand value is Enterprise. In a tabular view this is straightforward since it supports cross column conditional formatting. But since in our case this is a pivot table, go back to the criteria tab and edit the formula tab of the Region column. Type in the below formula.

‘<!– ‘|| Products.Brand||’ –>’||Markets.Region

Now, convert this column to a HTML format.

Once this is done, go to conditional format of this column and give the necessary conditional formats (You would have to choose all the 4 Enterprise Brands||Regions. This is the main drawback with this approach. It would really nice if conditional Formatting supports the containsAny operator ).

Now, if you go to the pivot table you would notice that all the regions which are under the Enterprise Brand would be highlighted. The idea is to basically concatenate the columns and then apply the conditional formatting. The formula above (which is nothing but HTML commenting) will avoid the display of the columns multiple times.

Not the best solution but can be useful if you somehow need to use cross-column formatting in pivot tables.