Abhinav's Tech Blog: UIX Hack 4 - Removing the worksheet breadcrumb

Monday, December 19, 2005

UIX Hack 4 - Removing the worksheet breadcrumb

A Discoverer forum post on OTN last week asked how to remove the had a query on how to remove the worksheet breadcrumb from the Viewer page. You cannot do that by using the Viewer customizations feature available from the App Server Control (see Section 9.2 - Customizing Discoverer Viewer - of the Oracle® Business Intelligence Discoverer Configuration Guide, 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.1) for Microsoft Windows and Solaris Operating System (SPARC), Part No. B13918-03, link to doc on OTN). You can however do a lot of other customizations to the layout, and the look and feel.

To remove the breadcrumb, you have to get your hands dirty with UIX (see links to previous posts on UIX and UIX hacks in Discoverer at the end of this post).

Before I get into what is required (and it is really quite simple), I must warn you on two points:

Such hacks are not supported and not encouraged. Why? Because Oracle Support will insist you reproduce any problem you have with your Discoverer installation WITHOUT these hacks. You cannot call/contact Oracle Support for any, and I repeat ANY, issues you may run into as a result of using these hacks. These hacks are not fully tested, nor are they guaranteed to work on all combinations of platforms. Any upgrade or patch you may apply to your Discoverer installation will most likely overwrite these customizations. And finally, because we do not guarantee that we will continue to use UIX in future releases. So any effort you expend into gaining UIX expertise for the purposes of Discoverer customizations may likely be useless in the future.
Ok, I only had one point, albeit a long-ish point. Well, no! I do have a second point!!. The second point is that if you do create an unsightly furor over any problems with UIX hacks, I shall get into trouble, and shall most certainly be proscribed from writing on these hacks.

Ok, I have carried out my duty about warning you in letter and spirit. Let's move on with the hack now, shall we?

The offending breadcrumb in question is shown below, circled in red.

To remove this, you need to edit a UIX file. The file is located under the following folder: C:\ias\j2ee\OC4J_BI_Forms\applications\discoverer\discoverer. c:\ias is the folder on my machine where Discoverer is installed. Under this folder is a file named 'Worksheet.uix' (intuitive, isn't it?). First, make a backup of this file. Which can be as simple an operation as doing a copy-and-paste if you are using Microsoft Windows. Once this backup has been made, open the worksheet.uix file using a text editor like Notepad, vi, TextPad, etc...

Browse down the file till you find the line that starts with <breadCrumbs rendered=...
Select this line, and delete all lines starting with this line till the line that starts with </breadcrumbs>, including this last line also. Save the file, re-start your OC4J_BI_Forms instance, and re-start Viewer. You should not see the breadcrumb any longer.

An alternative, and a simpler alternative at that, is to find the line that says:
<breadCrumbs rendered="${uix.eventResult.notPortalMode}">
Change this to:
<breadCrumbs rendered="false">
Save the file, re-start your OC4J_BI_Forms instance, and re-start Viewer. You should not see the breadcrumb any longer.

If things didn't blow up to high heaven, the breadcrumb should no longer be visible.

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Monday, December 19, 2005

UIX Hack 4 - Removing the worksheet breadcrumb