Cookies in OBIEE

I had a requirement to do some sort "hand-shaking" between OBIEE and APEX for security purposes: basically I had to read a session variable that was set by APEX then set a cookie using that session variable avlue. As many bloggers pointed it out a lot can be done using javascript in OBIEE. This posting gives a very simple example.

First I set the values of apex_biee_key in the rpd using a simple query (in our set up this value is set by the apex application).

Initialization block to populate apex_biee_key

Javascript for reading apex_biee_key session variable and setting a cookie with the same name: APEX_BIEE_KEY

Create an html report with the javascript code:

html/css trick

I had an issue yesterday with a field that contained a concatenated type code (Type in this report) and a ROW_WID . The report is supposed to show the Type value only:CA instead of CA384639 for the Type field while maintaining the correct subtotal count.

Substring function to extract the first two letters as follows doesn’t work because the subtotal operation is performed AFTER the substring command is done

You get then for the first subtotal 1 instead of 2 because even though the aggregation is set to “count distinct” , it's counting 'CA'

The solution we used kind of a kludge but it worked): change the Type data type to “HTML” and using a CSS to hide the WID part, enter the following in the column formula:

is basically a CSS tag to hide text

And voila you get

OBIEE and Google Chrome

Answers used to not work correctly with Google Chrome however It looks like that issue has been fixed with the latest release Chrome 2.0.172.31.

Youpi!

OBIEE Plug-in for Oracle11g OLAP Option available

The Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) Plug-in for Analytic Workspace Manager (AWM) allows you to quickly create an OBIEE repository that will allow the OBIEE Server to query Oracle Database 11g OLAP cubes.
Instructions: Link
Download: Link
Video Demo: Link

Left navigation menu (part 2)

One thing I learned is that when using "link/image" section pointing to a dashboard, securing the dashboard will automatically secure the link e.g let's say user A doesn't have access to the "Security" dashboard then the section containing the link the "Security" dashboard won't be shown to the user. To illustrate this let's create one group for each dashboard

-HOME
-ADMINISTRATION
-MY_ACCOUNT
-REPORTS

-SECURITY

And let's assign user_a to all the groups except SECURITY and let's assign user_b to all the groups. When user_a login they get the left navigation menu without SECURITY

While user_b

gets all the links:

This is nice, when creating a link to a dashboard using "link/image" one only need to secure the dashboard then the link is secured de facto.

Left navigation menu (part 1)

I had a request from a customer to implement a left navigation menu and to disable top navigation links that comes out of the box. I would not recommend this for a large implementation or not at all even...
Turns out enabling navigation from the left hand side isn't too hard however securing the links can be tricky...The requirement was to have role based left navigation menu. For example the power user would see for example

-Home

-Administration

-Manage my account

-Reports

-Security

and as an ordinary user

-Home

-Manage my account

and so on.

Another requirement was to have 'widgets' with personalized contents on the "home" dashboard for each user. (I hope to cover this section in the near future)


Implementing this is straight forward using the OOT features of OBIEE by basically creating goups/dashboards and assigning users to groups and groups to dashboards.

I am going to illustrate one way of achieving this using a left navigation menu:


Starting from an empty dashboard I created 5 sections on my dashboard corresponding to the links listed above (refer to screenshot)

Each section content is of the "link/image" type.

I am going to create 5 dashboards for illustration: Home,Administration,Manage My Account, Reports, Security and wire each "link/image" to its corresponding Dashboard. For example for home


Now we have all the links working.
I will cover next the security for the left navigation menu

Add hyperlink to OBIEE Login Page

I had a requirement to add a link to the OBIEE Login page. This hyperlink points to an app for resetting password in this particular case. Here is how it's done:

In the utilmessages.xml in

OracleBI\web\msgdb\l_en\messages

Locate the tag

"kmsgNQuireLegalCopyright"

add the link below the text as illustrated in the picture

Restart your BI server and Presentation server :