What’s the Latest with Siebel Actuate Reports Conversion Utility?

 

I have talked about the Actuate to BI Publisher reports conversion for Siebel by using the Actuate Migration Utility at this blog before.

• Actuate to BI Publisher Reports Conversion for Siebel – Part 1
• Actuate to BI Publisher Reports Conversion for Siebel – Part 2

However, that was more than a couple of months ago therefore we’ve got some updates with the latest Actuate to BI Publisher reports conversion utility. Now the tool can generate Integration Objects (IO) based on the Siebel reporting object, which is quite useful because most of the existing custom reports use the reporting objects to generate the reporting data in the old Actuate based reporting framework.

So let me go through the reports conversion at very high level. The detail can be found in a PDF document that comes with the utility called, ‘Converting Reports from Actuate to Oracle BI Publisher’.

Where you can download?

You can download the Actuate to BI Publisher Reports Conversion Utility from Oracle’s support web site (a.k.a Metalink).

Once you are at the support web site you can type ‘8968224’ as a Patch ID to search the conversion utility. There are different versions for each version of the Siebel release.

How to Start?

With this tool you can do two things. One is to convert the reporting objects to the Integration Objects (IO). Another is to convert the Actuate BAS files to BI Publisher RTF template files.

The utility is a Java program so you can technically run it on either Windows or Unix/Linux environment. However, there is a command line script provided to assist you to run the utility easier. And the command line script is only for Windows. So I’d recommend using this command line script on Windows unless you have other special requirements that you can’t.

And since the utility is a Java program, you need to have a JDK or JRE setup on your machine before you run this tool. The JDK/JRE version should be 1.5 or later.

How to Use to Generate IO?

Run the Utility Script

First of all, you need to ensure that you have an ODBC connection to the local Siebel Tools database and that it works fine.

You can use ‘run_IOC’ command script to generate the IO. Here is a sample command line to call the utility’s script to generate an IO

run_IOC –r <Siebel Tools report name> -d <ODBC Datasource Name> -u <DB username> -p <DB password> -l <log file path> -ll <log level> -n <IO name>

The Report Name (-r) and ODBC Data Source Name (-d) are mandatory while other parameters are optional.

Parameter	Note
-r	Report Name. You can find this name as ‘Access Base DB Name’
-d	ODBC Data Source name
-u	username for Siebel user ‘SIEBEL’. This is case sensitive.
-p	password for Siebel user. This is case sensitive.
-l	log file path
-ll	log level. The option can be: SEVERE, WARNING, CONFIG, INFO, FINE, FINER, FINEST, ALL, or OFF
-n	If you want to override the generated IO name then you can use this option. But it’s better to not use this option so that the IO will be generated with a name starting with ‘BIP_’, which is required to be shown up in the IO list at the report template page.

And here is an example:

run_IOC -r SALES -d SSD -l C:\Conversion\Logs\Sales.txt -ll all

Import IO

Once the Integration Object(s) have been created in Siebel Tools, you can archive the Integration Object(s) into an archive .sif file, delete the Integration Object(s) and then re-import the archive .sif file back into Siebel Tools. This step is necessary to ensure the new repository objects have a unique ROW_ID. This will require the SRF to be compiled.

 

How to Use to Generate RTF Template?

Generate BAS File

First, you need Actuate BAS file to convert to the RTF Template. The Actuate report definition is stored in a ROD file so you need to generate the BAS from the ROD if you don’t have yet. You can generate the BAS files with Actuate eReport Designer. Here is the basic steps.

1. Open one of your ROD files in the Actuate eReport Designer
2. Click on Report-Build or press Shift+F8

This will generate BAS file under the same directory where the original ROD (xxx.rod) file is located.

Convert from BAS to BI Publisher RTF Template

Once you got the BAS file now you can call the script called ‘run’ to convert the BAS file to BI Publisher RTF template file. Here is the command line syntax.

run –i <bas filename> -o <output filename> -l <log filename>

Note: The option -i is a mandatory while -o and -l are optional. If you don’t specify then it will generate the RTF template and the log file to the location where you specify for the bas file location.

And here is the example:

run -i SALES.bas -o SALES.rtf -l Sales.log

The above conversion script also supports a batch conversion where you can convert multiple BAS files to BI Publisher RTF Template files. You can specify a folder that contains multiple BAS files instead of a file name. Here is the example.

run -i D:\Conversion\BAS -o D:\Conversion\RTF -l D:\Conversion\Log

Modify and Upload RTF Template

Now you get the RTF template file generated and you can start reviewing it and making necessary changes. Based on my experience it will take some effort to do this manual modification depends on how many scripts are in the original reports and how well the original reports have been kept maintained. Also the conversion utility sometimes generate some functions that don’t work. I will discuss about these manual modification stuff in another post.

Once the manual adjustments are done then you need to register this RTF template to the Siebel server with the Web client and associate it with a View where you want to run this report from.

I will talk about Siebel’s custom extended function next week, so stay tuned!