Manual Install for OC4J instance

Manual install in BI Publisher means you deploy a BI Publisher EAR file by using your J2EE application server utility and configure the BI Publisher repository.

Why Manual Install?

There are several cases where you want to consider the manual installation.

• You already have OC4J server up and running. No need to install the whole suite. Instead want to install or reinstall only the BI Publisher Enterprise server.
• You already have Oracle BI EE installed and want to re-install only the BI Publisher part of the whole BI EE suite.
• You already have an existing BI Publisher environment and need to upgrade it to the latest version.
• You want to create another BI Publisher server instance on the same OC4J server so that you can have multiple BI Publisher server environments on a same machine for testing, etc.

There might be some other reasons but these are the most common requirements that I’ve seen at the BI Publisher projects. Also, I would recommend to install manually at least once so that you can get familiar with this manual process and get to know what is happening during the installation therefore you can better manage your application environment.

How to Deploy BI Publisher to OC4J instance?

First you need to find a BI Publisher EAR file. This can be found in the installation media. Note that there are two BI Publisher EAR files, one is located under ‘oc4j’ folder and anther is under ‘generic’. In order to deploy for the OC4J instance you need the one under the ‘oc4j’ folder.

e.g. D:\BI_Media\Windows\Server_Ancillary\Oracle_Business_Intelligence_Publisher\oc4j

You can deploy either from Oracle Enterprise Manager (web UI) or command line. Since Enterprise Manager has its own web UI and offers more administration tasks I’d recommend to deploy with Enterprise Manager.

You can start Enterprise Manager from your browser by adding ‘em’ after your hostname and port number. So it should be something like:

http://hostname:port/em (e.g. http://bip-server:9704/em)

Enterprise Manager (EM) UI

You can click ‘Application’ link and click ‘Deploy’ link in the next page.

You need to select ‘xmlpserver.ear’ file location. Note that you must select the one under ‘oc4j’ folder, not the one under ‘generic’ folder.

In the next page you can specify Application name and Context Root.

Click ‘Next’ button and again click ‘Deploy’ button in the next page to start the deployment.

After the deployment has been completed you will see the completion message. At this point your BI Publisher has been deployed on your OC4J instance. But there is one configuration you need to do before you access to BI Publisher Enterprise UI page, which is to setup your BI Publisher repository path.

Configure BI Publisher Repository Path

The BI Publisher deployment creates a configuration file with a default setting for the BI Publisher repository path. So you need to modify this value to suit to your environment. You can find this configuration file under:

%OC4J_HOME%\j2ee\home\applications\xmlpserver\xmlpserver\WEB-INF

e.g. C:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\applications\xmlpserver\xmlpserver\WEB-INF

Before:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xmlpConfig xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/xmlp"> <resource>     <file path="${oracle.home}/xdo/repository"/> </resource> </xmlpConfig>

After Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xmlpConfig xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/xmlp">   <resource>     <file path="C:\OracleBI\xmlp\XMLP"/>   </resource> </xmlpConfig>

If you don’t know where is your BI Publisher repository you can copy a sample repository from the installation media. There is a folder named ‘XMLP’ and you can find sub folders such as ‘Reports’, ‘Admin’, etc. That’s the BI Publisher repository. So you can copy the entire folder and paste it to the location where you want to store the repository.

Once you have updated the configuration file you need to restart the OC4J server. After that you can now access to the new BI Publisher Enterprise server instance.

I’ll cover the Manual Install for Oracle WebLogic Server next time. Stay tuned!