Tag: OBIEE 11g

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform, Data Security February 15, 2013October 10, 2019

“Create” button Inactive in the Application Roles page in OBIEE 11g

There is a bug in OBIEE 11g that makes the “Create” button Inactive in the Application Roles page in OBIEE 11g. The good news is the solution is very simple.

In case you have not yet seen this issue, but would like to know what this is referring to, then … login to the Enterprise Manager – http://yourserver:7001/em and expand Business Intelligence and click on coreapplication. Then navigate to the Application Roles page using one of the methods below …

Either from:
(1) the ‘Security’ -> ‘Single Sign On’ tab, select “Configure and Manage Application Roles”

(2) or from the coreapplication drop down menu, select Security -> Application Roles

When you get to the Application Roles page, you will notice that the Create button is INACTIVE.

To activate the button, simply select the drop down for Application Stripe and select <No application stripe selected>, then reselect the appropriate Application Stripe such as obi.

The Create button will now be ACTIVE. Of course, click the play button to generate the list of Application Roles if necessary.

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform February 3, 2013October 11, 2019

Setting up Putty to display screens on your desktop for installing or upgrading OBIEE 11g on Linux

When you attempt to run the RCU (Repository Creation Utility) or UA (Upgrade Assistant) scripts from your desktop/laptop using Putty for an OBIEE install or upgrade on a Linux server, you may get the following error …

UPGAST-00107: The DISPLAY environment variable is not set. The graphical user interface (GUI) requires that this environment variable be set on UNIX.

If you get this error, this post may help you to solve it. You need to do some configuration in Putty.

Open Putty.

Select the server that you want to configure from your list of servers. You will notice that the values get populated into the fields.

Expand SSH, the select X11. Then Check “Enable X11 forwarding” checkbox, and enter “localhost:0.0” in the X display location box.

Do not click open at this point.

Go back up and click on Session in the left menu.

And then Save.

However, before you connect using Putty, you should run Xming.

Start -> All Programs -> Xming -> Xming

[If you do not have Xming, you can download it for free, then install it.]

Now when you open Putty and connect to your server, you should be able to run the install or upgrade processes and see the wizard screens for each step, for example …

> ./ua (run the UA script, then the wizard screen will appear)

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform January 19, 2013October 11, 2019

UPGAST-00014 error when upgrading OBIEE 10g RPD and Catalog to OBIEE 11g

If you get this error during Step 4 of the Upgrade Assistant for upgrading OBIEE 10g RPD and/or Catalog to 11g, then this post might be helpful.

UPGAST-00014: unable to connect to WebLogic Server at localhost:7001
t3://localhost:7001: Destination unreachable; nested exception is: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused; No available router to destination

Perform the following steps that may resolve your problem:

– Log in to Administration Console. http://yourserver:7001/console
– Click the ‘Servers’ link.

Then in the Summary of Servers page / Configuration tab, click ‘AdminServer(admin)’.

– From the Settings for AdminServer page, select the ‘Protocols’ tab, then the ‘Channels’ subtab.
– And then Click ‘Lock & Edit’ button in the upper left Change Center.

– Click the New button to begin creating a new Network Channel.
– Enter the following information…
Name: Loopback (or whatever name you like)
Protocol: t3

– The click Next

– The enter …
Listen Address: localhost
Listen port: 7001
Click Finish

The new Network Channel (Loopback) is added. Activate the changes by clicking on the “Activate Changes” button.

Now, retry running the Upgrade Assistant. There is no need to restart any of the services.
You should now get past Step 4 (the point at which you were getting the error before).

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform January 16, 2013October 11, 2019

Unable to see Administration link or dashboards with Administrator ID in OBIEE 11g

If you are unable to see Dashboards or the Administration link after logging in with the administrator ID in OBIEE 11g after upgrading from 10g, this post may help.

Manually change URL by attaching “saw.dll?Managegroups” to the end after analytics, so it looks like this … http://yourserver:9704/analytics/saw.dll?Managegroups

Select the “Presentation Server Administrators” catalog group and Edit

Add the “BI Administrator Role” Application Role by selecting it in the left and using the arrows to move it to the right.

Log out and log back in with the Administrator ID.

You should now be able to see the “Administration” link at the top right, and also be able to see the dashboards that you had access to by clicking or mousing-over the Dashboards link/dropdown.

Business Intelligence Platform, Reporting January 3, 2013October 5, 2019

Renaming the Views in an Analysis for use in a View Selector in OBIEE 10g & OBIEE 11g

In OBIEE 10g, we renamed the Views directly inside the View Selector definition like here…

In OBIEE 11g, we rename the View inside the View definition itself … like here …

then rename …

And then you will use/select the new name in the View Selector (instead of renaming it in the View Selector).

This is much better because you know exactly what view is being used in the View Selector. Whereas in 10g, at times it took more effort to determine what original view the renamed views related to.

Business Intelligence (BI) Development, Business Intelligence Platform December 11, 2012October 11, 2019

‘No fact table exists at the requested level’ error in OBIEE 11g

If you receive an error like this when you attempt to run a report, this post might help you. This is an error that may occur after upgrading from OBIEE 10g to 11g.

State: HY000. Code: 10058. [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: HY000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred. [nQSError: 43113] Message returned from OBIS. [nQSError: 43119] Query Failed: [nQSError: 14025] No fact table exists at the requested level of detail:

Check each column used in your report and each column used in the filter definition to ensure that they are referencing the correct table.

A likely cause of this error is that one or more of your select columns or filter columns is referencing a column in a different subject area that the one being used in your report (different from the one you intended).

OBIEE 10g was more forgiving than 11g – and maybe fortunately, so that errors like these do not go unnoticed/undetected.

Business Intelligence Platform December 7, 2012October 5, 2019

Data type related error in OBIEE 11g – Error Codes: OPR4ONWY:U9IM8TAC:OI2DL65P

If you receive an error like this in OBIEE 11g, this post may help you resolve the problem. This is an error that you may get after upgrading from OBIEE 10g to 11g.

Error Codes: OPR4ONWY:U9IM8TAC:OI2DL65P
State: HY000. Code: 10058. [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: HY000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred. [nQSError: 43113] Message returned from OBIS. [nQSError: 43119] Query Failed: [nQSError: 59140] The evaluation of the index 11 expression on row count -1 failed. [nQSError: 59001] Binary Logical operation is not permitted on VARBINARY, INTEGER operand(s). (HY000)

OBIEE 10g is a lot more forgiving than 11g. So what worked in 10g may not work in 11g – such as data type mismatches. For this error, you need to check the data types of your columns and the data types of the values being used in your column calculations.

For example, you may have a column formula like this …

sum(case when “Table”.”Column”=3 then 1 else 0 end)

Note the column is being used like an INTEGER. This worked in 10g, but does not in 11g.

When you check the data type in your RPD, it may show that the column is a VARCHAR. You then will need to put quotes around the value (the ‘3’) … like this …

sum(case when “Table”.”Column”=’3’ then 1 else 0 end)

This should hopefully solve the problem.

Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence (BI) Development, Business Intelligence Platform November 21, 2012October 10, 2019

Using Custom Images in OBIEE 10g & 11g

In both OBIEE 10g and 11g, custom images need to be placed in 2 folders before use within reports/dashboards.

In OBIEE 10g, images need to be placed in:

(1) $BIHOMEoc4j_bij2eehomeapplicationsanalyticsanalyticsress_oracle10images

Windows directory path example:
C:OracleBIoc4j_bij2eehomeapplicationsanalyticsanalyticsress_oracle10images

Linux directory path example:
/usr/local/OracleBI/oc4j_bi/j2ee/home/applications/analytics/analytics/res/s_oracle10/images

-and-

(2) $BI_HOMEwebappress_oracle10images

Windows directory path example:
C:OracleBIwebappress_oracle10images

Linux directory path example:
/usr/local/OracleBI/web/app/res/s_oracle10/images

In OBIEE 11g, images need to be placed in:

(1) $OBIEE_FMW_HOMEuser_projectsdomainsbifoundation_domainserversbi_server1tmp_WL_useranalytics_11.1.17dezjlwarress_blafpimages

Windows directory path example:
C:obiee11guser_projectsdomainsbifoundation_domainserversAdminServertmp_WL_useranalytics_11.1.1silp1vwarress_blafpimages

Linux directory path example:
/u01/product/middleware/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/bi_server1/tmp/_WL_user/analytics_11.1.1/7dezjl/war/res/s_blafp/images

-and-

(2) $OBIEE_FMW_HOMEOracle_BIbifoundationwebappress_blafpimages

Windows directory path example:
C:obiee11gOracle_BI1bifoundationwebappress_blafpimages

Linux directory path example:
/u01/product/middleware/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/web/app/res/s_blafp/images

Note: you may also create or use directories at the same level or below the images directories under the s_oracle10 (in 10g) and s_blafp (in 11g) directories, for example, if you wanted to put all your custom images into a separate directory.

Then in Answers / Analysis, you would reference the image as shown below.

Edit the Column Properties:

Then, in the Style tab, within the Cell area, click on the Image object…

Then in the Graphics dialog, select “Custom Image” and enter fmap:images/your_custom_image.jpg.

Note: If your images are in a directory other than the images directory, you need to supply that path, but still starting below s_oracle10 or s_blafp directories.

And set the Image Placement property. Images Left (shows the Image to the left of the column data), Images Right (displays the image to the right of the column data), Images Only (displays the image only – no column data)

If new images were placed into the directories after the last BI Server / Presentation Server restart, you will need to restart the BI Server and Presentation Server for the images to be displayed.

Business Intelligence Platform November 12, 2012October 5, 2019

How to remove the popup menu when navigating from one report to another via a navigation link

When you click on a navigation link value, by default a pop-up arises with the name of the possible report(s) that you can navigating to. Even if it’s just one possible report, the pop-up still occurs (see example below). This happens after upgrading from OBIEE 10g to 11g, and there is no system wide setting to fix this.

This can be annoying to users because its an extra unnecessary click. They want to be navigated to the next report after the single click on the navigation link. Especially if they worked on OBIEE 10g before and did not have to do this. The good news is, removing this popup is easy.

Edit Dashboard

Edit the Analysis

Edit the Column Properties for the relevant column

In the Column Properties dialog, go to the Interaction tab.
Check the box below the Action Links table for “Do not display in a popup if only one action link is available at runtime”

Once you check the box for one column in your analysis, it will become checked for all navigation link columns in that analysis – so you do not need to check for others columns after you have done for any one column.

You will now be navigated directly to the next report without the popup showing. Unfortunately, this has to be done for each report because there is no system wide setting to change it for all.

BI Administration, Business Intelligence Platform, Data Security October 5, 2012October 11, 2019

Configuring OBIEE 11g to use LDAP (Active Directory) Authentication with External Groups table

I have been working on configuring OBIEE 11g to use Active Directory for authentication and an external table for Groups. It has been a bit of a challenge primarily because I was not familiar with the Active Directory terminology and parameters, and so I was initially doing some guess work – about what the various parameters should be set to, and it was not very easy to determine what was and what was not correct.

Anyway, thanks to a few Oracle documents and a few blog articles I have made significant progress and I think I have it working properly now, and testing it thoroughly.

Below are some of the documents and articles that I used…

Here you will find some Oracle documentation:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14571_01/bi.1111/e10543/toc.htm

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/bi.1111/e10543/privileges.htm#BIESC6054

A great intro article:

http://www.rittmanmead.com/2012/03/obiee-11g-security-week-understanding-obiee-11g-security-application-roles-and-application-policies/

An article directly related to the topic:

http://www.rittmanmead.com/2012/03/obiee-11g-security-week-connecting-to-active-directory-and-obtaining-group-membership-from-database-tables/

These provided some more details that helped me to understand the parameters better and be in a better position to work with the Active Directory administrator:

http://bimetrics.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/integrating-ms-active-directory-with-obiee-11g-in-weblogic-server/

http://obieeelegant.blogspot.com/2012/01/obiee-11g-integration-with-ldap.html

http://paulcannon-bi.blogspot.com/2012/07/configuring-ldap-authentication-for.html

http://www.biztech.com/blog/2011/09/integrating-active-directory-with-obiee-11g/

Good luck!