Cheat Sheet for BI Publisher Integration with BIEE - Part 1

Do you still have BIEE and BI Publisher integration not working ?

This integration of BI Publisher and BIEE has been there for quite a while and I’m sure many of you have done this and enjoying the integration. But still today, I hear from the fields that some people out there having some challenge to set it up. Though all the configuration steps required for the integration are all documented in Oracle BI EE Infrastructure Installation and Configuration guide, I wanted to go through all the integration points briefly and talk about the best practice and configuration tips.

This post is rather for someone who have already gone though the Installation guide yet still facing some problem. This is not an introduction and I'm not covering the detail of the configuration steps so I can’t express enough but please make sure you have already gone through the documentation where you can find the detail information.

 

Security

You can integrate BI Server security model as BI Publisher’s security model. It is strongly recommended to use the BI Server as the BI Publisher’s security model if you need to integrate those two products.

Before you setup:

• Before you try to integrate the BI Server security make sure you have enabled ‘Super’ user in the BI Publisher’s Security page so that you can always login even when the security integration didn’t work.
• Test the connect string under JDBC data source before you use that for the Security Model setting.

Points to note:

• Once the integration is done now you manage all the users and groups in BI Server (RPD). That means you cannot add any user or group from BI Publisher’s Administrator web UI.
• All the groups of the BI Server will be shown as Roles in BI Publisher’s security page. In the Security page you need to assign appropriate report folders and data sources to each necessary role so that the users in the group can access to appropriate reports and run.
• You need to create those XMLP_xxx groups in BI Server (RPD). These groups should be already there if you have installed the BIEE suite, but may not with a standalone version or upgraded from the older releases. if you don’t see them then create them as groups and assign users to those groups to provide appropriate BI Publisher functionality.
• The port number for the JDBC connection is not 9704, it’s 9703 if you use the default configuration of BIEE. You can find this port number from NQSConfig.INI file. Look for RPC_SERVICE_OR_PORT to find the port number. (e.g. RPC_SERVICE_OR_PORT = 9703)
• There is not cascading group concept for the BI Publisher’s pre-built privilege (role) such as XMLP_ADMIN. For example, if you want to provide an Administrator role to a user A then you need to directly assign the user to the role called ‘XMLP_ADMIN’. Assigning a group, which belongs to ‘XMLP_ADMIN’, to the user A will not provide the Administrator’s role to the user.
• Though the XMLP_xxx roles don’t support the cascading group concept but other roles does, which you use to assign the users to appropriate report folders and data sources.

Troubleshoot:

Can’t Login!

Once you have setup BI Publisher to use BIEE’s security model you should be able to loging to BI Publisher with the BIEE user. However, there is one thing to note that BI Publisher has a different rule on which letters can be used for the password from the one for BIEE. So if you are using a special character in the BIEE password and getting a login error this is where you want to check.

Also make sure that the Connect String for the BI Server is correct.

 

Access to BI Publisher from BIEE - More Products

Though you can always access to BI Publisher from its own login page you can also access it from BIEE’s web UI by navigating from ‘More Products/BI Publisher’ menu.

Troubleshoot:

Getting an error when select BI Publisher from the menu!

This integration is the trickiest one based on what I have been seeing at our customer projects. In order for this to work you need to add Publisher Administrator credentials to Oracle BI Presentation Services Credential Store by using BI Server’s cryptotool.

When BI Presentation Services establishes a connection with BI Publisher it uses BIP's Administrator username and password stored with the alias 'bipublisheradmin' in the BI Presentation Services Credential Store. The Credential Store can be a XML file and the default file is credentialstore.xml, which can be found at %OracleBIData_Home%\web\config. The password is encrypted and stored in the Creadentail Store file.

In order to create (or update) the Credential Store file you can use a command line utility called cryptotools, which can be found at %ORACLEBI_HOME%\web\bin for Windows. This tool will add a pair of username and password into a creadentialstore.xml file.

The steps required for this are documented in the Installation and Configuration guide. But here is an example of how you can run the cryptotools utility to store the credentials.

Example:

Assuming your OBI admin user is, 'Administrator' and its password is 'Administrator', you can run the cryptotools utility to add 'bipublisheradmin' user alias like following.

C:\OracleBIData\web\config>cryptotools credstore -add -inFile credentialstore.xml -alias bipublisheradmin -username Administrator -password Administrator -passphrase admin

Once you run the above command you'll be asked the following two questions, answer 'y' to the both questions.

 

>Do you want to write the passphrase to the xml? y/n (n): y >File "credentialstore.xml" exists. Do you want to overwrite it? y/n (y):

Every time you change the Administrator’s password you need to run the cryptotools utility to store the new credentials to the credential store.

 

Tomorrow!

I will talk about other integration points that allow you to use BI Answers or BI Server as data source tomorrow, stay tuned!