Start BI Publisher Enterprise Server for your E-Business Suite Data!

 

BI Publisher has always supported the EBS (Oracle E-Business Suite) security as one of the security model options. However, when it comes to the EBS data level security there was no straight forward way to support it before. And this has prevented many folks from moving to BI Publisher Enterprise Server for the EBS reporting even when we know that BI Publisher Enterprise Server would provide a great deal of benefits that come with it such as Data Model Editor, Layout Editor, Interactive View, just to name a few.

So, we added the EBS data level security support with the latest release of 11.1.1.5 to help our EBS customers to move to BI Publisher Enterprise Server and take advantage of such benefits.

I created a quick video demo for this new feature, if you are interested check the following video.

 

If you prefer reading or like to know more detail please continue.

What is the EBS Role Based Data Security?

If you are familiar with EBS you probably know the data level security comes with the responsibility and org_id combination. Each responsibility is associated with an org_id and the user selects a responsibility before running a report. And many of the EBS database views, which typically many of the EBS reports query against, use the org_id to filter the data. Therefore, based on your selection of the responsibility you will get a different set of the data for a single report. And of course this means that another user with a different responsibility would see a different set of the data from the one you would see.

 

 

And that’s exactly what we did with BI Publisher Enterprise Server with the release of 11.1.1.5. Now the user can select one of the responsibilities that are assigned to the user at the login time or from the My Account profile setting. Once the user select it BI Publisher automatically takes care of that by setting an application context passing the org_id when it opens a EBS database connection for the user.

How to Configure?

There is no extra configuration to enable the Role Based Data Security at all. Once you have integrated your BI Publisher Enterprise Server with your EBS by selecting ‘Oracle E-Business Suite’ as the security model and upload the EBS application dbc file, then BI Publisher will take care of all the security related stuff from there based on the user’s selection of the responsibility!

How It Works?

Right after you login to BI Publisher Enterprise Server with your EBS user id and password, you will be asked to select one of the responsibilities assigned to you. Once you select one then it’s all set. Any following database query will have the application context with the org_id that is associated with your responsibility.

1. Login to BI Publisher Enterprise Server with EBS user id and password.

2. When you login you’ll be asked to select one of the responsibilities you have. And BI Publisher will use this information to support the EBS role based security.

 

If you want to change the responsibility after you have logged in then you can go to ‘My Account’ dialog by clicking your username at the right hand side top and select one of the responsibilities listed under ‘Group’ tab.

Here is a sample report ‘Customer Open Balance Report’, which I have migrated from the EBS instance by using the BI Upgrade Assistant Utility and added some report layouts. The following screenshot shows when I select a responsibility ‘Receivables Vision Germany’.

When I change the responsibility to ‘Receivables Vision France’ in the My Account dialog box, now I get a different set of the data.

The above example is based on the RTF template that I have downloaded from the EBS instance, which is one of the out-of-box report layout templates that come with EBS R12, and uploaded to this report. Now, because I’m in BI Publisher Enterprise Server I can use the Layout Editor, which is the pure web browser based report design tool, so I created a similar layout with the Layout Editor. Here is the one.

And, one step further, since I can now use the Interactive capability of BI Publisher Enterprise Server why not create another layout that takes full advantage of that ! And here is the one.

This sample layout actually shows the Role Based Data Security much more obvious. The above example is when I select ‘Receivables Vision Germany’ where you can see the Country list shows ‘DE’ and ‘US’. The below example is when I select ‘Receivables Vision France where you can see the Country list is showing ‘FR’ and other components in the report showing a different set of data compares to the above. 

 

Start BI Publisher Enterprise Server for your EBS data!

With the new EBS Role Based Data Security support this is the best time to start moving your Oracle E-Business Suite reporting to BI Publisher Enterprise Server to take advantage of all the great features that come with the Bi Publisher Enterprise Server. It’s not just that it offers better usability and rich functionality over the embedded version inside the EBS and it allows you to extract data from many other different data sources and combine and aggregate, but also it enables you to deliver the next generation operational reporting that satisfies both pixel perfect customer facing requirements and interactive analytical reporting requirements to gain much greater insights from your operational/transactional data.

Happy Operational Reporting 2.0!

If you have any feedback to share please contact me directly at ‘kanichiro.nishida@oracle.com’.