Discoverer 11g Doc

If you see the Discoverer 11g Documentation library at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/pfrd.htm, you will notice the familiar set of docs, with one new addition. There is now a doc for the Discoverer Web Services. The "Oracle® Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Web Services API", 11g Release 1 (11.1.1), Part Number E10412-01 can be viewed at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/bi.1111/e10412/toc.htm, or downloaded as a PDF from http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/bi.1111/e10412.pdf

As a brief intro, these web services are a layer of SOAP based web services that sit on top of Discoverer, provide access to a variety of functions, and provide a level of abstraction from the underlying implementation of the functionality that these services expose.

The very first instance where these web services were used was in the integration between BI Publisher and Discoverer (see my posts on this topic from 2007), that happened with the BI Publisher 10.1.3.3.0 release and Discoverer 10.1.2.2 release in 2007. Actually, there was a one-off patch that had to be applied on top of Discoverer 10.1.2.2 which contained the web services libraries. However, these web services were not yet meant to be consumed externally by customers for building their custom integrations. The intent was to document these and release them with the Discoverer 11g release. There is a slightly fascinating history behind the evolution of this project that I will try and blog about in a future post.

The other place where these web services shall be used is in the integration of Discoverer with the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, also referred to sometimes as simply OBIEE. Specifically, and since this is about functionality not yet released, please bear in mind that some or all of this could change, so do not take this as official Oracle communication, the intent is to use these Discoverer web services to publish Discoverer worksheets to an OBIEE Dashboard page, and to also use these same web services to allow OBIEE Delivers to run and send Discoverer worksheets on a scheduled basis.

More later.

RSS Feeds in BI EE Dashboards

One of the several hundred new features in the latest release of BI EE is the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds of alerts and catalog folders, which is a really nice way of bringing the world of analytics to the user. In this post I look at subscribing to RSS feeds for catalog folders.

From your Dashboards Editor page, add a "Folder" dashboard object - and click the "Properties" button.


From the "Folder Properties" popup, click the "Browse" button, and select the folder or sub-folder and select it. Then, and obviously enough, check the box that says "Show RSS Link".


Save your changes. On the dashboard page, in addition to seeing your folder contents, you now also see the orange "XML" icon that now almost universally stands for an RSS feed. Right click this icon and copy the link's location.


Having copied the URL of the RSS feed (the orange icon thingy), the next step to do is to add this feed URL to an RSS feedreader. Thunderbird is as good a reader as any, so let's use it for our example.


In the RSS subscriptions window, click the "Add" button, and paste the BI RSS feed link that you copied above (the orange thingammy) and click 'OK'.


You most likely shall be prompted for a user name and password, so please do the needful - enter the correct password (the truth shall set you free... free to read the RSS feeds, i.e.).


Having done that, Thunderbird updates the feed.


Back in your Thunderbird main window, you can see that my feed shows some six feeds, five of which are unread. Click on any of the feed links to see the BI report displayed right there.


Pretty darn nice I should say... Needless to say I shall be using this to keep track of my feature area's bug reports (a BI EE dashboard and reports built on top of our internal bug tracking system).


A word about privileges and all that - as you would expect, you can specify whether someone, everyone, or no one has access to RSS feeds. To do that, you have to go into the "Administration" page (from the "Settings >> Administration" link). From there, find the line that says "Manage Privileges", click it, and then from the resulting page, click the link that says "RSS Feeds". There you can add or remove users or groups that have access to RSS feeds. The default option at the time of installation is "Everyone".







Lastly, if you need more information, for more details you can refer to the "Oracle Business Intelligence Answers, Delivers, and Interactive Dashboards User Guide, Version 10.1.3.2" as well as the "Oracle® Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide", Version 10.1.3.2, December 2006, Part Number: B31766-01, available from http://docs.oracle.com/

BI Publisher and BI EE Suite Integration - Dashboards

Continuing on my earlier post on the integration between BI Publisher and BI EE (BI Publisher and BI EE Suite Integration - 1), this post looks at how you can add BI Publisher content to your BI Dashboard.

In case you are wondering what BI Publisher is (formerly known as XML Publisher), look no further than this page on OTN (well actually, look at this page, and then come back to this post):

Oracle BI Publisher reduces the high costs associated with the development, customization and maintenance of business documents; while increasing the efficiency of reports management. Utilizing a set of familiar desktop tools users can create and maintain their own report formats based on data extracts from diverse sources.
BI Publisher is built on open standard technologies. It is a J2EE application that can be deployed to any J2EE container.

If you see the screenshot below, I have a Dashboard page in edit mode, with two columns. The right column already contains a dashboard prompt, and a couple of Answers reports.
On the left column I want to add some BI Publisher content, which I have created and have available. This could be anything: from pixel perfect reports, to invoices, to standard reports, or just about anything else I may want to create using BI Publisher.
There is a new Dashboard object that has been added in BI 10.1.3, a "BI Publisher Report". This is what I shall use to add BI Publisher content to my Dashboards page.


Select and drag this "BI Publisher Report" object and drop it into the "Section 1" placeholder.





To specify the BI Publisher content, click the "Properties" in the object region above. This pops up a dialog where you can specify the content as well as how the content should appear...


For my purposes, I navigate to the "Shared Folders >> Business Intelligence" folder and select the "Paint Demo" report.


Click 'OK' and click the 'Save' button on the Dashboard page.
See below that the Dashboard page has updated with the BI Publisher report. I have two formats available for this report - PDF and RTF. Mind you, I could have specified HTML and other supported formats also, but for this report I have these two formats specified.
Since BI Publisher also allows me to associate multiple 'templates' or layouts to a single report, I can even select from these available templates, right here in my Dashboard page.


In this case I have a second template, "Revenue Grouped by Year, Region" also available, in case the charts are not what I want to look at.


And there you have it - a nicely formatted report, with all the correct headers, footers, page breaks, etc... The world of adhoc analytics meets the world of pixel perfect reporting.


Related links (I promise to stop including these related links in every post soon, real soon):

• BI Publisher and BI EE Suite Integration - 1
• BI Enterprise Edition - First Look - Post Install
• Oracle BI Enterprise Edition - First Look - Instal...
• BI EE 7.8.5.2 also available
• BI EE 10gR3 - Go Get the software
• Online tutorial for BI EE
• BI EE Documentation now available
• Gartner Research Note on BI
• Oracle a leader in latest Gartner BI Platform Magi...
• Announcing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise...