11.1.1.5 New Feature – More Data to Audit and Monitor

We believe Auditing and Monitoring capability for Reporting is crucial for the IT management and governance regardless if it’s enterprise level or department level deployment. So we are always committed to improve our BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring capability since we introduced it for the first time
With the first release of 11g (11.1.1.3) we added this Auditing and Monitoring capability, which enables you to monitor who access to which report at what time.

• How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?
• How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

With this new release of 11.1.1.5, we added more data to audit and monitor especially more BI Publisher reports specific information such as:

• Report output format type
• Layout Template name
• Reporting locale
• If the reports is run online (on-demand) or through the scheduler
• Processing time
• Reporting data size
• Report error message
• Scheduled job information

And these information can be all available through the database tables so you can use BI Publisher to generate your Auditing reports or visualize the data to gain more insights about how your users are doing on your reporting platform.
If you are interested in the power of the new BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring, here is a video.


And, if you want to know how to enable the Auditing with the new data sets I’ll cover that below.

Enable Auditing Data

There are three things you need to do to enable the Auditing data.

Setup basic Auditing configuration

I have already talked about these steps before, take a look at these two posts for the detail.

How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?

How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

Run ‘xmlpserver_audit.sql’

There is a SQL script that you can run to create an additional table, which will store more BI Publisher reports specific data to audit and monitor.
Let’s take a look how to run the script step by step.
1. Change the current directory to ‘%BI_HOME%user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/config/bipublisher/repository/Admin/Audit’.
This directory should contain a file called ‘xmlpserver_audit.sql’ file.
2. Run this script as SYS or SYSTEM user and alter the session user to the schema who owns the AUDIT tables.
Example:
Let’s say you have created the Audit schema with the RCU with ‘KAN_IAU’, then you can follow something like below.

$ sqlplus / as sysdba SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Mon May 2 13:53:49 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle.  All rights reserved. Connected to: Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options SQL> alter session set CURRENT_SCHEMA = KAN_IAU; Session altered.

Now you can run the ‘xmlpserver_audti.sql’ script. Note that, when you run you'll be prompted to enter the following three schema names.

• Basic Auditing Schema name
• Edit Auditing Schema name
• View Auditing Schema name

With the above example of using ‘KAN_IAU’ as your basic schema, it would be something like below.

• KAN_IAU
• KAN_IAU_APPEND
• KAN_IAU_VIEWER

Here is the example:

SQL> @xmlpserver_audit Table created. Index created. Enter value for 1: KAN_IAU old 1: GRANT ALL on xmlpserver to &&1 new 1: GRANT ALL on xmlpserver to KAN_IAU Grant succeeded. Enter value for 2: KAN_IAU_APPEND old 1: GRANT INSERT on xmlpserver to &&2 new 1: GRANT INSERT on xmlpserver to KAN_IAU_APPEND Grant succeeded. Enter value for 3: KAN_IAU_VIEWER old 1: GRANT SELECT on xmlpserver to &&3 new 1: GRANT SELECT on xmlpserver to KAN_IAU_VIEWER Grant succeeded. old 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM &&3..xmlpserver FOR &&1..xmlpserver new 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM KAN_IAU_VIEWER.xmlpserver FOR KAN_IAU.xmlpserver Synonym created. old 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM &&2..xmlpserver FOR &&1..xmlpserver new 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM KAN_IAU_APPEND.xmlpserver FOR KAN_IAU.xmlpserver Synonym created.

After that you need to restart the WebLogic Server to take that in effect. Once that’s done, BI Publisher will start feeding all the auditing and monitoring related information into the auditing tables, and you should be able to start access to the data to create reports and visualize it with BI Publisher.

Create Reports to Visualize

If you have already finished the steps mentioned on the previous blog posts then you should already have a JNDI/JDBC connection created. If you haven’t yet, then take a look at the following post. 

How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher? Make sure you assign appropriate application roles to this data source connection so that you or any users who need to create reports for the BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring data will have an access to the data source.


With this new set of data available, you can now start creating reports to gain more insights about how your users use the reporting platform and prepare for a better reporting experience by responding and adjusting promptly.

Start with Sample Reports

We’re planning to release a set of sample Auditing and Monitoring reports as part of our sample reports inside the catalog some time soon but till then you can start creating your own reports against the Auditing tables by using BI Publisher. For those looking for something quick, I’m attaching a sample report here

• Sample Auditing Report
• Sample Auditing Data Model

You can download the above files and upload them to your BI Publisher 11g (11.1.1.5) environment from the BI Publisher Catalog UI, but make sure the following three points before you run.
1. Change the Data Model reference inside the Auditing report to point to the Auditing Data Model that you uploaded

2. Change the Data Source inside the Auditing Data Model to your JNDI connection

3. Update the SQL query to point to appropriate schema name.

Path to Improve Reporting Experience

Again, the Auditing is not just about collecting the auditing data and record it. It’s about how you as IT manager or administrator understand your users and reports on the reports environment in order to improve the reporting experience. The more you understand them the better service you can provide. We believe that the new release of BI Publisher 11.1.1.5 would provide you a wide range of data to help you understand your reporting environment better and quickly. Hope you’ll enjoy the power of new BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring capability.
Also, as always, we’re very interested in your feedback. Please let us know what do you think about the data currently available, the sample reports, any additional requirements or improvement suggestion.

11.1.1.5 New Feature – More Data to Audit and Monitor

We believe Auditing and Monitoring capability for Reporting is crucial for the IT management and governance regardless if it’s enterprise level or department level deployment. So we are always committed to improve our BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring capability since we introduced it for the first time

With the first release of 11g (11.1.1.3) we added this Auditing and Monitoring capability, which enables you to monitor who access to which report at what time.

• How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?
• How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

With this new release of 11.1.1.5, we added more data to audit and monitor especially more BI Publisher reports specific information such as:

• Report output format type
• Layout Template name
• Reporting locale
• If the reports is run online (on-demand) or through the scheduler
• Processing time
• Reporting data size
• Report error message
• Scheduled job information

And these information can be all available through the database tables so you can use BI Publisher to generate your Auditing reports or visualize the data to gain more insights about how your users are doing on your reporting platform.

If you are interested in the power of the new BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring, here is a video.

 

And, if you want to know how to enable the Auditing with the new data sets I’ll cover that below.

Enable Auditing Data

There are three things you need to do to enable the Auditing data.

Setup basic Auditing configuration

I have already talked about these steps before, take a look at these two posts for the detail.

How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?

How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

Run ‘xmlpserver_audit.sql’

There is a SQL script that you can run to create an additional table, which will store more BI Publisher reports specific data to audit and monitor.

Let’s take a look how to run the script step by step.

1. Change the current directory to ‘%BI_HOME%user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/config/bipublisher/repository/Admin/Audit’.

This directory should contain a file called ‘xmlpserver_audit.sql’ file.

2. Run this script as SYS or SYSTEM user and alter the session user to the schema who owns the AUDIT tables.

Example:

Let’s say you have created the Audit schema with the RCU with ‘KAN_IAU’, then you can follow something like below.

$ sqlplus / as sysdba SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Mon May 2 13:53:49 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle.  All rights reserved. Connected to: Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options SQL> alter session set CURRENT_SCHEMA = KAN_IAU; Session altered.

 

Now you can run the ‘xmlpserver_audti.sql’ script. Note that, when you run you'll be prompted to enter the following three schema names.

• Basic Auditing Schema name
• Edit Auditing Schema name
• View Auditing Schema name

With the above example of using ‘KAN_IAU’ as your basic schema, it would be something like below.

• KAN_IAU
• KAN_IAU_APPEND
• KAN_IAU_VIEWER

Here is the example:

SQL> @xmlpserver_audit Table created. Index created. Enter value for 1: KAN_IAU old 1: GRANT ALL on xmlpserver to &&1 new 1: GRANT ALL on xmlpserver to KAN_IAU Grant succeeded. Enter value for 2: KAN_IAU_APPEND old 1: GRANT INSERT on xmlpserver to &&2 new 1: GRANT INSERT on xmlpserver to KAN_IAU_APPEND Grant succeeded. Enter value for 3: KAN_IAU_VIEWER old 1: GRANT SELECT on xmlpserver to &&3 new 1: GRANT SELECT on xmlpserver to KAN_IAU_VIEWER Grant succeeded. old 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM &&3..xmlpserver FOR &&1..xmlpserver new 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM KAN_IAU_VIEWER.xmlpserver FOR KAN_IAU.xmlpserver Synonym created. old 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM &&2..xmlpserver FOR &&1..xmlpserver new 1: CREATE OR REPLACE SYNONYM KAN_IAU_APPEND.xmlpserver FOR KAN_IAU.xmlpserver Synonym created.

After that you need to restart the WebLogic Server to take that in effect. Once that’s done, BI Publisher will start feeding all the auditing and monitoring related information into the auditing tables, and you should be able to start access to the data to create reports and visualize it with BI Publisher.

Create Reports to Visualize

If you have already finished the steps mentioned on the previous blog posts then you should already have a JNDI/JDBC connection created. If you haven’t yet, then take a look at the following post. 

How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

Make sure you assign appropriate application roles to this data source connection so that you or any users who need to create reports for the BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring data will have an access to the data source.

 

With this new set of data available, you can now start creating reports to gain more insights about how your users use the reporting platform and prepare for a better reporting experience by responding and adjusting promptly.

Start with Sample Reports

We’re planning to release a set of sample Auditing and Monitoring reports as part of our sample reports inside the catalog some time soon but till then you can start creating your own reports against the Auditing tables by using BI Publisher. For those looking for something quick, I’m attaching a sample report here

• Sample Auditing Report
• Sample Auditing Data Model

You can download the above files and upload them to your BI Publisher 11g (11.1.1.5) environment from the BI Publisher Catalog UI, but make sure the following three points before you run.

1. Change the Data Model reference inside the Auditing report to point to the Auditing Data Model that you uploaded

2. Change the Data Source inside the Auditing Data Model to your JNDI connection

3. Update the SQL query to point to appropriate schema name.

Path to Improve Reporting Experience

Again, the Auditing is not just about collecting the auditing data and record it. It’s about how you as IT manager or administrator understand your users and reports on the reports environment in order to improve the reporting experience. The more you understand them the better service you can provide. We believe that the new release of BI Publisher 11.1.1.5 would provide you a wide range of data to help you understand your reporting environment better and quickly. Hope you’ll enjoy the power of new BI Publisher Auditing and Monitoring capability.

Also, as always, we’re very interested in your feedback. Please let us know what do you think about the data currently available, the sample reports, any additional requirements or improvement suggestion.

BI Publisher 11g - 11.1.1.5 is here!

New Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 11.1.1.5 is released! Here is a list of the new features.

	Much Faster Interactive Reporting Experience Using BI Publisher to interact with your data is snappy. Generating interactive report output uses less memory and is faster than ever. BI Publisher’s highly optimized, three layer caching mechanism provides a highly responsive, interactive reporting experience.
New Interactive Component - List The List component is a nifty way to filter data in an interactive report. When you click values in the list, BI Publisher automatically filters the data in the report. In the Layout Editor you can set the orientation of the List to be horizontal or vertical and over 30 other options to make it visually appealing for your consumer needs. Lists are another great way to interact with your report to gain more insight.
	Both Native and Web Apps for iPhone & iPad More and more business tasks are performed on mobile devices like iPhone and iPad, so why not browse reports and interact with your data on your mobile device with BI Publisher? Simply access your BI Publisher reports with Safari or other browsers on your iPad or iPhone, or install the Oracle BI Mobile App for iPhone and iPad to enjoy the same rich, fast interactive reporting experience as on your desktop or laptop.
Enterprise Reporting Platform for Oracle - E-Business Suite BI Publisher now supports Oracle E-Business Suite’s data level security based on user responsibility and allows you to switch responsibilities on the fly. You can use BI Publisher 11.1.1.5 to view, manage, and deliver reports against E-Business Suite data and join and aggregate with data from other data sources. Utilities are available to help you convert from Oracle Reports and upgrade to BI Publisher 11g. Start taking advantage of many of the great BI Publisher 11g new features with your E-Business Suite data today.
	New Data Source – Local Excel File Often times you need data in Excel to supplement other data or you need to visualize it quickly. BI Publisher 11.1.1.3 added Excel files as a data source so you could create a report against Excel data located on the server. BI Publisher 11.1.1.5 goes one step further. Now you can upload Excel spreadsheets from your local machine directly to a Data Model. Create reports from the uploaded Excel spreadsheet or join it and aggregate it with other data sources. Reporting with local Excel files is a great way to empower your users to visualize and share data easily and still maintain a centralized report environment.
New Template Type - Excel Template Some users just love Excel, so we added Excel as a report layout design option. In addition to the existing template options like BI Publisher Templates, RTF, PDF, Flash, and others, you can now use Excel to design your report the way you want, using custom functions and Excel Macros to split data across multiple sheets, calculate values dynamically, then share with your colleagues.
	Auditing and Monitoring Auditing is not just about compliance, it’s a way to improve customer service by understanding what your users like to do, when and how they access and view reports. BI Publisher 11.1.1.3 included a framework to help IT Administrators collect data required for auditing. BI Publisher 11.1.1.5 enhances the audit and performance information captured and introduces a method to store the data into a database. Now you can use BI Publisher to visualize, analyze and report on your auditing and performance information.
New Output Format Type – Native Excel 2007 Output Now you can download your report as Excel 2007 format and open it with the latest Excel on both Windows and Mac with high fidelity formatting and layout. You can use repeating groups in your report to automatically group data in separate worksheets. With this format option the downloaded Excel file is 70% smaller compared to other Excel output types, which makes it easier to share your report in Excel with your colleagues.
	Reports Development Life Cycle Management Developing reports often involves multiple phases and processes before going live. Reports need to be moved to a testing environment after the development and then to the production environment. You can use the new BI Publisher Catalog Utility to move your reports either one at a time or in batch from one environment to another all without shutting down servers so users can continue to generate the mission critical documents and reports they need.

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Share and Deliver BI Publisher Reports in Multiple Languages

When you share your reports with someone who speak and read in different languages you want your reports to be shown in their language, right ? Well, translating reports with BI Publisher is not only easy but also reduces the maintenance cost a lot.

Many of us in the BI Publisher product development team used to work in Globalization and Multi Lingual support, which enables Oracle products and applications to be used in many different languages and countries and territories.  And we have a lot of experience in this area. In fact, being a strategic reporting platform for Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and many other Oracle application products, our customers from all over the world are generating thousands of thousands of reports, including out-of-the-box pre-developed reports from Oracle and customer created or customized reports, in their own local language everyday as they operate and manage their business.

Today, I’m going to talk about this very topic, how to translate my reports with BI Publisher 11G.

Translation Grows, not the Numbers of the Reports

Most of the reporting tools, regardless if it’s traditional or new, always take this translation on the back burner. They require their users to copy an original report and translate the whole thing. So when you want to support additional10 languages you will need to have 10 copies of the original. Imagine when you have 50 reports then you will end up having 500 reports (50 x 10) ! Now you need to maintain these 500 reports, whenever you need to make a change in a report you need to apply the same change to the other 10 reports. And as you imagine this is not only a nightmare for IT managements but not acceptable especially for the applications like Oracle EBS that supports over 30 languages.

So first thing we did was, very simple, we separated the translation out of the report and marry it to the report only at the report generation. This means, regardless of how many languages you need to support you need to have only one report and translation files for the 10 languages, which would contain the translated letters and words. So let’s say you have 50 reports and need to support 10 languages for those reports you still have only 50 reports and each report now has 10 language translation files. Yes, translation is the one should grow as you add more languages to support, not the report itself!

And second, we provide the translation files in XLIFF format, which is an international standard XML based format to exchange and maintain translation strings. So once you generate the XLIFF files for your reports with BI Publisher then you can work with any translation vendors in the world to make a mass translation or you can translate the XML files by yourself by manually updating the translatable strings presented in this text file.

Lastly, we made it easier to manage the translation process starting from generating the XLIFF files to uploading the translated XLIFF files back to the BI Publisher server. You can generate, download, upload the XLIFF files from the BI Publisher’s Web interface with your browser and you can see the translated reports right away without needing to shutdown or restart your server. While the translated reports are displayed based on your language preference setting you can also specify a different language when you schedule or deliver the reports so that they can be generated in your customer’s preferred language.

What Can I Translate?

When it comes to translation there are three things.

First, report content translation. When you receive a report you like to see the content like report title, section title, comments, annotation, table column header, and anything that are static and embedded in the report. in your preferred language. We call this Reports Content translation.

Second, when you open a report online you might want to see not only the report content being translated but also the report UI, such as report name, parameter name, layout name, and anything that would help you to navigate around the reports, to be translated in your language. We call this Reports UI translation. And this separation of the Reports Content and Reports UI translation makes it very useful especially when you want to navigate through the reports in your preferred language UI but want to generate the reports in your customer’s preferred language. Imagine you are English native speaker and need to generate and send a report to your customers in China. You like to see the report name, parameter name in English so that you can comfortably navigate to the report and generate the report output, but like to see the report generated in Chinese so that the your customers in China can understand the report when they receive it.

And lastly, you might want to see even the data presented in the report to be translated. For example, you might want to see product names in an Order Status report to be translated based on the report viewer’s language preference. We call this Reporting Data translation. Since this Reporting Data translation is maintained at the data source level such as Database tables along with the main data, you need to prepare the translation at the data source level first. Then, you want to make sure that your query is switched accordingly based on the language preference setting so that the translated data will be retrieved.

How to Translate BI Publisher Reports?

Now when it comes to ‘how to translate BI Publisher reports?’ the main focus here is about the translation for the Report Content and Report UI. And I just created this video to show you how to create and manage the translation with BI Publisher 11G. Please take a look at the clip below.

 

In today’s business world, customers and suppliers are from all over the world regardless of the size of the company or organization. Supporting multiple languages for your reports is no longer something ‘nice to have’, it’s mandatory. BI Publisher is designed to support multi lingual reports from the beginning without any extra hidden cost of license or configuration like other reporting tools such as Crystal Reports. You can support additional languages translation at any time with the very simple steps shown in the video above. Happy translation!

Please share your translation experience with us! 

Oracle BI Publisher 11G Installation

Have you already installed BI Publisher 11G and started playing around ? Well, as much as I was excited about the release news when I came back from my big vacation, I had a bit of bumps on the road of installing until logging into the initial home page. First, I couldn’t proceed on the installer wizard steps more than step 4, then after having fixed the problem I still couldn’t start some BI services and then couldn’t open BI Publisher login window.

Well, finally figured out the root cause of the issue and its solution. Basically, that my PC environment was Windows XP on a VM (Parallel/Mac) and it’s running on DHCP. And the installer and some components (it’s BI Cluster Controller Server) don’t like it. So I needed to install a Loopback Adaptor and setup a static IP address, and then register that with machine name in Window’s etc/host file properly.

After that is done and cleared up the failed installation completely, the installation worked like a charm. It took about one hour or so and was so smooth that I don’t even remember what I was frustrated about! Anyway, hope your installation went smooth without hassle like the ones I had. But if it didn’t you might want to proceed reading and hope this helps you to get going.

Installation

In order to install BI Publisher 11G you need to get the BIEE 11G installation  package either from OTN or eDelivery. Then you create a repository in your database by using RCU (Repository Configuration Utility) before you start installing the BIEE 11G.  I’m not going to talk about the detail steps of the installation here, you can find many posts on other blogs out there or the installation guide about such detail steps with screenshots. The installation steps itself is pretty simple. However, if your network is not configured well then you will get in trouble big time. So make sure your network configuration before you start installing BI 11g.

Network Configuration

This is mandatory and really critical thing to do especially when you are trying to install onto your laptop or PC desktop with DHCP setting.

Basically there are three things to do before the installation in terms of the network setting.

1. Make sure if you have installed MSFT loopback adapter.
2. Set a static IP address to the loopback adapter network.
3. Set the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\host file with a computer name and the static address you set to the loopback adapter.

All the detail can be found in this Oracle Database 11GR2 Installation guide. Click the link, it gets you directly to the network configuration section.

But one tricky thing is a domain name for your machine name such as ‘us.oracle.com’. If you are not sure about the domain name then don’t include it in the etc/host file. My example is below.

# For example: # #      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server #       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host 127.0.0.1       localhost 127.0.0.1       .psf 10.10.10.10   knishida-vm1

Make sure you reboot your machine once you have set the network configuration, then start the BI11g installation. Without this proper setting you will hit the following issues:

1. You can't proceed the installation steps after where you type username/password for weblogic user.
2. Your ClusteringControler or PSServer doesn't start
3. You can't login to Answers or any other BI apps
4. You can't even open BI Publisher login window
5. You can't open RPD online

I’ve already installed, Any workaround to fix it manually ?

If you have already installed BI11g and having the above issues you can workaround by setting up the etc/host file properly. If there is still a problem starting up the BI Clustering Controller Server then remove a domain name, which is 'us.oracle.com' in my case, from NQClusterConfig.INI located under C:\biee11\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIApplication\coreapplication (I installed the BI11g under C:\biee11.) if any. After removing all the domain name restart only the cluster control server manually from the Fusion Control (EM) then you should be able to start the cluster control server, and then you will be able to open BI Publisher page and login, or login to BI first then access to BI Publisher page. However, this workaround might be wiped out the next time you stop and start all the BI services. As you have realized by this time, regardless of whether you select ‘Simple Install’ or ‘Enterprise Install’ at the installation the BI Clustering Control Server gets installed. And you need that to access to the BI Server even if there is only one, and hence you need that to login to BI Publisher.

Need to Reinstall or Cleanup ?

So, while you can workaround the network issue as mentioned above I still strongly recommend that you review the network configuration and do a fresh install again. The issue like above can be work around temporally, but the workaround will be needed to perform every time you start the BI servers, which is not going to make you a happy camper.

When you do try another fresh installation then make sure you completely delete the original one by following the sequence mentioned in the installation guide. If you have something still left over from the previous installation you will get an error message during the installation. Here is a brief highlight of the steps in the order.

1. Run the deinstall script and select the Deinstall instances managed by a WebLogic domain option.

2. Stop all Oracle Business Intelligence processes and servers, including all OPMN-controlled components and JEE components.

3. Drop the Metadata Services (MDS) and Business Intelligence Platform (BIPLATFORM) schemas using RCU.

4. Run the deinstall script and select the Deinstall the Oracle home option.

5. Deinstall the Oracle Common home manually or by running the deinstall script that it contains.

6. Use the Oracle WebLogic Server uninstaller to uninstall WebLogic Server.

7. Remove the Oracle home (if necessary).

8. Remove the Middleware home and any other homes (Domain home, Applications home, and Instance home) that might have been installed outside of the Middleware home.

After following the steps documented in the installation guide to delete everything, make sure you don’t have any entry in the registry if you are installing onto Windows system. Especially the following stuff.

1. Remove all the registry entries that contains the Oracle - OHxxxxx. (e.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI\coreapplicatin_OH868503665)
2. If you have followed the steps mentioned above you shouldn’t see this. But if you still see this Oracle Common Home menu (‘Oracle – OHxxxxx’) from the Start –> Program File menu then remove it by going to ‘C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs’ in the registry then delete such.
3. Even If you have followed the steps above you might still see the OPMN and Node manager windows services, you can do this by deleting these entries from registry, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services

Share Your Experience!

Well, hope you have installed BI Publisher 11G successfully and start playing around and getting excited about the new features and products as I do now. But if you have found any issue and workaround during the installation and configuration please share!

Here Comes BI Publisher 11G!

It’s been long since the last post. I’ve been on vacation plus leave of absence and traveling around northern Europe with my bike ‘Surley’. It was the best trip in my life and maybe the best thing I’ve ever done. But now back to work, another thing I love!

Well, first thing I found when I came back is the news of BI EE 11G being released finally! This is the long waited and much needed release with a lot of innovative new features and products. It provides much winder solutions and functionalities and it is the most competitive product in today’s BI and Reporting market. It’s Complete, Integrated, and Open.

And sure enough it goes the same for BI Publisher too. This is the most anticipated and the most innovative release with a lot of new offereings. Let me go through briefly.

Data Model Editor

This is a new product targeted for the reports developers. Well, probably I don’t need to explain how this product improve your development productivity. Now you don’t need to see or edit the Data Template XML files anymore! You can build queries, create calculations and define the data structure all in the Data Model Editor Web UI. Along with this, now the data model you create is completely separate from reports. That means you can choose any existing data model when you create a report. This makes the report maintenance much easier and improve the data quality and governance.

Layout Editor

This is another new product targeted for both Business Users and Reports Developers. This is a tool that you can use to create from a simple report to a management report to a pixel perfect report within the Web UI. You don’t need to install anything, not even need an add-ins or anything. The Web UI is similar to the MS Office 2007 , it’s very intuitive so the business users don’t need to have any special training. You can open the Layout Editor with your browser, select data columns you want to display, format and layout as if you use MS-Word, then boom, you get your report output the way you want and many different formats.

Interactive Viewer

 

This is personally the most excited new product in this release for me. Finally BI Publisher brought your reporting experience complete and rich. You can not only generate the reports in a pixel perfect, but the same report allows you to interact with the data to get deeper insight. You can click any chart or pivot table within the report and all the data presented in the report automatically and instantaneously updated and filtered based on the Click! I’ve been working on many BI and Reporting projects where often the reports requirements contains both pixel perfect and interactivity nature. Until recent the users either needed to sacrifice some functionalities or requirements for a sake of selecting one reporting tool or needed to have two reports with two different reporting tools or components. This brought a tremendous frustration and maintenance headache on both the report users and developers. But not anymore. This is the complete reporting solution for both interactive reporting and product reporting, and for both the users and the developers.

Well, there are many other new enhancements like Enterprise Security and Scalability, Scheduler, UI, Reports editor, new diagnostic capability, etc. I will talk about them some time soon. So stay tuned!

Date Formatting and Handling for Siebel Reporting

I have discussed about the Siebel Date related issue before at one of the posts. The issue is that the IO returns the date data in a different format from the one BI Publisher expects (Canonical format), which prevents BI Publisher from formatting the date or handling the date data with its functions.

There are some workarounds available I discussed about at the post. But not anymore! Siebel Reporting product development team at Oracle has addressed the issue so you don’t need the workaround anymore!

IO Returns Date in Canonical Format with 8.1.1.2 !

UPDATE: Actually, this functionality didn’t make it to the production. It’s planned, but I don’t know when or which release will have the fix. I will update once I get the update. Meanwhile you can use the following ‘getCanonicalDate’ function.

First, with the latest FixPack 8.1.1.2, which was released recently, the IO now returns the date in the canonical date format. So you can use BI Publisher’s date related function or formatting with the data without any workaround.

New Function - getCanonicalDate

Second, if you can’t apply the FixPack 8.1.1.2 then you can download an updated XSLFunction.jar file from Oracle Support page (ID 764191.1) and replace the original with this new one. This new library includes a function called, ‘getCanonicalDate’, and this is the one you can use to convert the Siebel date string to the canonical date format.

Here is an example of how you can use the ‘getCanonicalDate’ function.

<?namespace:psfn=http://www.oracle.com/XSL/Transform/java/com.siebel.xmlpublisher.reports.XSLFunctions?> xdoxslt:date_diff('d', psfn:getCanonicalDate(CreatedDate), psfn:getCanonicalDate(LastUpdatedDate), $_XDOLOCALE, $_XDOTIMEZONE)

As you see in the example, make sure you declare the ‘psfn’ namespace first before you use the ‘getCanonicalDate’ function. You can take a look at ‘Siebel’s Extended Function for RTF Template’ if you don’t know how to enable your Word Add-ins Template Builder to test with the library.

And of course, you need to replace the existing one with this new library at the server side to take this in effect when you run the report. You need to do this at the two places, one is at BI Publisher server, and another is at Siebel home.

BI Publisher Server

Take a look at the bookshelf, ‘Copying Siebel JAR files to BI Publisher’, which describes the detail.

Siebel Home

Replace %SIEBEL_HOME%/classes/XSLFunctions.jar with the downloaded one.