What Administrators Should Do for Siebel Reporting with BI Publisher?

There are a couple of things you want to perform as Administrators to manage the Siebel Reporting environment and maintain the BI Publisher reports in Siebel. Here is a list of the tasks that the Administrators should be responsible for.

• Purging Siebel Reports
• Optimize Siebel Reporting Environment
• Enabling Logging for Debugging

Purging Siebel Reports

When the users run the Siebel reports all the generated reports output files will be stored on the Siebel database. These files can be opened from the ‘My BI Publisher Reports’ menu. However, at a certain point of time you might want to delete some of the files due to the size of keeping all the reports on the file system and also due to a compliance matter.

You as Siebel Administrator can purge such report files from the Siebel database using filters or by running a workflow process. I’m going to talk about how to set up reports to be automatically or manually purged.

Automatic Purge

You can set up to automatically purge your reports from the Siebel database after a specified time interval. The ‘BIP Delete After Days’ system preference allows you to specify any non-zero positive value that executes the Auto Purge workflow to purge the reports. Based on the value that you enter, the reports are purged from the database after the number of days specified.

To automatically purge reports

1. Log in to the Siebel application with system administrator privileges.
2. Navigate to the Administration - Application screen, then System Preferences view.
3. In the System Preferences list, select ‘BIP Delete After Days’, and change the value to any positive nonzero value.
   By default, the value is set to -1 (minus 1), which means it never purge.
   
   
   
4. Navigate to the Administration - Server Management screen, then Jobs view.
5. Add a new job
6. Click the search icon to select ‘Workflow Process Manager’
7. Click 'New’ button to add a Job Parameter to the job
8. Select Workflow Process Name for the name
9. Type ‘XMLP Purge Records’ as the value
10. Click Submit.

Alternatively you can schedule this job to run periodically using the Siebel workflow, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide for the detail.

Manual Purge

When manually purging Siebel reports, you can specify criteria by which the reports are purged. Reports meeting that criteria will be removed from the Siebel database. You can also purge multiple reports together by selecting a date range, the reports that were generated within the specified date range will be purged. If both the report name and the date range are entered, then only those reports with that name and that were generated within that specified date range are purged. You can also purge reports for a specific user by entering his/her user ID as the criteria.

To manually purge a report:

1. Log in to the Siebel application with system administrator privileges.
2. Navigate to the Administration - BIP Reports screen, then Purge Administration view.
   
   
3. In the Purge Administration form, you can select a report name, type From Date, To Date, and select User ID. You don’t need to fill all of them. Whatever you enter will be used as a criteria to select the reports to be purged.
4. Click Run.
   The reports that meet the specified criteria are purged.

Optimizing Performance for Siebel Reports

Now the next topic is to optimize the Siebel Reports runtime environment to have better performance and scalability. There are several attributes that you can use to best fit to your reporting and system requirements from performance and scalability perspective.

Here is a list of the attributes.

• Report Execution Wait Time
• Server Request Processor Wait Time
• Setting Concurrency Parameters
• Max Fetch Size (DSMaxFetchArraySize) for Large Data Volumes
• Enabling Scalable Mode

Execution Wait Time

By setting this threshold value you can cancel some of the reports, which would take longer than the specified time duration, to run. In some cases some reports might take a long time and when you have multiple reports taking long time at the same time other users might have to wait for those reports to finish the jobs. Typically such long running reports should be executed at when most of the users are not accessing such as at night time as a batch process, but there is no control to prevent the users to run such reports as long as they have access to them. So you can use this attribute to control such.

Here is a list of the steps to set the Report Execution Wait Time for Siebel Reports

1. Navigate to the Administration - Application screen, then System Preferences view.
2. In the System Preferences list, select BIP Report Wait Time, and then change the value to any number greater than 100. By default, the threshold is set to 100 seconds.

Setting the Server Request Processor Wait Time for Siebel Reports

Some times your database doesn’t respond due to heavy duty work currently being performed at the database or simply not available. Or there is a quick temporary issue on the network. Whatever the reason your report request trying to access to the database might not getting any response back. Typically the applications try to reconnect to the database after a certain waiting time. You can control this waiting time with this setting.

Follow the steps below to set the Server Request Processor Wait Time for Siebel Reports

1. Navigate to the Administration - Server Configuration screen,  Servers, and then Components view.
2. In the Components list, select Server Request Processor (alias SRProc).
3. Scroll down and click the Parameters subview, and then click Hidden.
4. In the Parameter list, select Database Polling Interval, and change value from 10 to 1. The Value on Restart and Default Values are updated as well.
5. Restart the Siebel Server.

Setting Concurrency Parameters for Siebel Reports

You can set a maximum number of tasks per XMLP Report Server, which is not the BI Publisher Enterprise but it’s the engine that takes care of the report request and response within the Siebel, per a single Siebel server. Also you can set a maximum number of MT (Multi Threaded) Servers per a single Siebel server.

Typical guideline would be:

• MaxTasks = peak (concurrent users)
• MaxMTServers = MaxTasks / 100
  

So, for example, let’s say you have 1000 users accessing to the reporting at the same time then the MaxTasks would be 1000 and the MaxMTServers would be 10. Note that this is a generic guide line and these numbers should not be used as a static number for your environment. Each environment and reporting needs would impact on the above numbers and requires a series of performance testing to come up with the best numbers.

You can follow the steps below to set concurrency parameters for using the GUI

1. Log in to the Siebel application with administrator privileges.
2. Navigate to the Administration - Server Configuration screen, Servers, and then Components view.
3. In the Components list, select XMLP Report Server.
4. Click on the Parameters view tab and set accordingly.

Optimizing Performance of Siebel Reports for Large Data Volumes

When you have a large data coming back for your reports then you can set a Data Source maximum fetch array size (DSMaxFetchArraySize) profile parameter value to ‘-1’ so that the size is unlimited. But again, this value should be fitting to your specific environment so you might want to increase the value to a certain threshold instead of setting it as unlimited.

You can follow the steps below to optimize performance of Siebel Reports for large data volumes

1. Navigate to the Administration - Server Configuration screen, Enterprises, and then Profile Configuration view.
2. In the Profile Configuration view list, select Server Datasource (alias ServerDataSrc).
3. Scroll down to the Profile Parameters, and then click Advanced.
4. In the Profile Parameters list, select Datasource maximum fetch array size (alias DSMaxFetchArraySize), and then change the value to -1.
5. Restart the Siebel Server.

Enabling Scalable Mode for Siebel Reports

When you have a large data volume or have complex XSL transformation logic you might want to enable BI Publisher’s XSLT engine to be scalable so that the engine will transform the raw data to XSL-FO template and generate the final output by using the hard disk instead of loading the file onto the memory space. In this way you can avoid ‘out-of-memory’ related issue at the BI Publisher’s reports generation process. You can enable the scalable mode parameter by configuring the BI Publisher’s configuration file, xdo.cfg file, which is located under the %JRE_HOME%\lib directory, where JRE_HOME is the one used for BI Publisher Enterprise Server.

To enable scalable mode for Siebel Reports

1. Navigate to the jre\lib installation directory.
   NOTE: The path for the Java installation folder varies depending on where you installed JRE.
2. Open the xdo.cfg file, and in the <Properties></Properties> tag, use the following syntax to set the Scalable Mode property to true (if not already set):
   <property name="xslt-scalable">true</property>
   NOTE: You can set Scalable mode to either true or false.
3. Save the xdo.cfg file.
4. Restart BI Publisher Server

Next

There are a few other critical things you can do as an Administrator such as Migrating the reports from Development environment to QA/Production environment, Enabling Logging for Debugging.

But that’s it for today and I will talk about such topics tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Install and Setup BI Publisher for Siebel Reporting

Siebel Business Applications ship with pre-developed BI Publisher reports. Using views in a Siebel application, you can run such pre-installed reports or create your own custom reports in both the connected and disconnected modes. Please take a look at ‘Siebel Reporting Architecture with BI Publisher’ for the detail architecture of connected and disconnected modes. In disconnected mode, BI Publisher libraries are already installed as part of the Siebel installation by making the core libraries available (in $SIEBEL_HOME/CLASSES) for report generation. However, if you want to use Siebel Reports in connected mode through a Siebel Web Client , you must install and configure BI Publisher Enterprise Server.

So today I’ll talk about how to install the BI Publisher Enterprise Server for Siebel.

Step 1 – Make sure that you have installed necessary pre-requisite software

There are some different software pieces that you need to complete the Siebel reports with BI Publisher development.

• MS Word
  
  BI Publisher uses MS Word to develop and design the report layout, RTF Template.
  
• BI Publisher Desktop Client – MS Word Add-in (Template Builder)
  
  This MS Word Add-in called BI Publisher Template Builder provides you a graphical interface to help you develop and design the RTF Template easier and allow you to preview the report final output in many different formats. It is a MS Word Add-in that you launch from inside the MS Word.
  
• Siebel Tools
  
  If you want to create a new Integration Object you need the Siebel Tools.
  
• JDK (Java Development Kit)
  
  BI Publisher Enterprise Server is certified with JDK 1.5. or later so make sure you have installed the JDK 1.5 on a machine where you will install the BI Publisher Enterprise Server.

Step 2 - Download BI Publisher Enterprise Server

You can download the BI Publisher Enterprise Server media from Oracle E-Delivery page.

Step 3 - Install BI Publisher Enterprise Server

Once you have downloaded you can follow the installation guide. The installation itself is pretty simple straight forward for a basic installation. Once you click on setup.exe (for Windows) then you follow the instruction with the installation wizard to complete the installation. For an advanced installation I have written a few posts before, so please take a look at them for the detail.

• Manual Install for OC4J instance
• Installation for Oracle WebLogic Server

Change the location of the BI Publisher repository (Optional)

Note that, by default, the Siebel application is looking for the ‘oracle.home’ JVM property value and wants to substitute the value inside the path. If you have installed the BI Publisher Enterprise Server with its embedded OC4 install option then this ‘oracle.home’ property value is automatically set by the installation. If not, then you need to manually change this value after the installation. If you are installation with WebLogic Server then you need to change this value before the installation. Please take a look at ‘Installation for Oracle WebLogic Server’ for the detail. 

How to Change ‘oracle.home’

Open WEB-INF/xmlp-server-config.xml file and change the following to the appropriate path.

<file path="${oracle.home}/xdo/repository"/>

Step 4 - Define the outbound Web service for the BI Publisher Server

1. Log in to the Siebel application with administrator privileges.
2. Navigate to the Administration - Web Services screen, then Outbound Web Services view. 
   
   
   
3. In the Name field, query for ‘PublicReportService’, and then change the BI Publisher Server machine name to your BI Publisher Server using the following format:
   
   :/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService">:/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService">:/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService">:/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService">http://<host.domain>:<port>/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService
   
   where:
   host is the full path for your BI Publisher Server
   port is the port the BI Publisher Server uses
   
   Example:
   http://da78112.oracle.com:9074/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService
   
4. Verify that the BI Publisher Server is running and ready to start generating reports.

Step 5 - Copy JAR files to the BI Publisher Server

For successful report generation when running Siebel Reports, you must copy the custom Java classes—that is, the JAR (Java Archive) files—associated with individual reports. By default, these Java functions are not available on the BI Publisher Server.

To copy JAR Files to the BI Publisher Server

1. Copy the following files from $SIEBEL_HOME/CLASSES to:
   OC4J_HOME/j2ee/home/applications/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/WEB-INF/lib
   
   - XSLFunctions.JAR
   - SiebelCustomXMLP.JAR
   - SiebelCustomXMLP_SIA.JAR 
   
2. Enable external file references by performing the following tasks: 
   
   2.1. - Log in to the BI Publisher Server.
   2.2. - Click the Admin tab, and then select Runtime Configuration and Properties. 
   2.3. - Change the Default value for the Disable External Reference attribute to FALSE.
   
3. Restart OC4J.

Step 6 - Enable Siebel Reports

Before using Siebel Reports, the XMLP Report Server Component component must be enabled. By enabling the XMLP Report Server Component, reports appear in the Reports Menu drop-down list in Siebel Business Applications.

To enable Siebel Reports

1. Log in to the Siebel application with system administrator privileges
2. Navigate to Administration - Server Configuration, Enterprises, and then Component Groups
3. In the Component Groups list, select XMLP Report, and then click Enable.
4. Click the Synchronize view tab, and then in the Component list, select XMLP Report Server
5. Click Synchronize
6. Restart the Siebel Server

Step 7 - Configure Database Authentication and Security

Siebel Reports supports the following two types of authentication:

• Server Component-based authentication - Administrators must specify the BI Publisher user ID and password at the XMLP Report Server Component level.
• External authentication (LDAP) - Administrators configure LDAP for both the BI Publisher Server and the Siebel Server. Using external authentication is optional.

In this post I’m going to talk about the ‘Server Component-based Authentication’. In order to call the BI Publisher’s web service you need to pass a pair of username and password. So basically you need to register a proxy user in Siebel so that the XMLP Report Server component within the Siebel application can use this proxy username and password to get authenticated first when it calls the BI Publisher’s web service to generate a report. The password can be encrypted.

To set the BI Publisher Server user ID and password

1. Log in to your Siebel application.
2. Navigate to Administration - Server Configuration, Servers, and then Components.
3. Query for XMLP Report Server, and then select it.
4. Click the Parameters tab and query for BIP*.
5. Enter the user ID and password used to access the BI Publisher Server in the Default Value fields of the BIP Server Login and BIP Server Password parameters.

Step 8 - Configure Font Files

To make sure fonts display properly in Siebel Reports, you need to copy the font files, which you want to use in your reports, to a directory on the Siebel Server machine where the XMLP Report Server Component is enabled. This task is typically performed as part of the Siebel Reports installation. However, you can perform this task later or at any given time.

On the Siebel Server machine where the XMLP Report Server Component is enabled, copy the fonts you want to use for your reports from, for example, C:\WINDOWS\Fonts directory, to the $JRE_HOME\fonts directory.

That’s pretty much it. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about some tasks that you as Administrator want to perform for the Siebel reporting. So stay tuned! 

Single Source of Truth - BI Publisher in Siebel

I have written about Siebel reporting with BI Publisher and the reports conversion from Actuate to BI Publisher last week here. However, since the development group in Oracle has been working on some enhancements to improve the reporting and migration process better so at some point in future the information on those posts might become to be staled. So I’m listing the source of information where you can keep yourself updated with the latest information below. Please bookmark and visit them periodically or when you need.

• Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Statement of Direction and Planned Features
  
  You can find the new BI Publisher integration related information under ‘Siebel Reports’ section.
  
• Siebel Reporting Migration
  
  You can find Actuate reporting support status, licensing related information including the current Actuate and upgrading to BI Publisher, BI Publisher’s future integration plans with other versions of Siebel, etc.
  
• Siebel Reports Administration Guide
  
  You can find all the Siebel/BI Publisher Reporting information including how to setup, administrate, develop, migrate, etc.

I’ll talk about more about the Siebel reporting with BI Publisher with topics like ‘how to administrate the reports’, ‘how to setup the BI Publisher environment’, etc, from tomorrow, so stay tuned!

6 Keys to Deliver Successful Reports Conversion Projects

Why Are We Doing This?

I hear often something like ‘we need to convert 100 numbers of reports within next two months, can you do it?’ Well, the answer might be Yes or No, it depends on budget, timeline, and other constraints. But more importantly, do we really need to convert all the 100 reports? We need to look at all the reports by asking, 'How many reports are really used today?’,  ‘How many of the reports are really meeting today’s business requirements?’ and ‘How are those reports serving or impacting their business?’. Without asking such questions and having clear answers, all the money and effort which will be spent for the conversion related work including project preparation, project delivery, production support and maintenance will not get much return, and the worst the project might not get enough sponsor support so that the it might be forced to shut down at the middle of the project.

Energize Your Users and Get Them Excited!

As I have discussed in the previous reports conversion related posts the reports conversion itself involves a lot of manual tasks and always requires a series of testing before going to a production. Also don’t forget that the reports conversion means you are introducing a new paradigm of the reporting system to your users who might have some resistance to move to a new system just because it’s new! and they’re not psychologically comfortable with it. So we need to think about how to support both end users and developers in a form of training, documentation, user group, discussion forum, etc so that not only they will be able to transform as easy as possible and minimize a business continuity risk impact, but also we can get them energized and excited and obtain a positive support and constructive feedback from them for even a bigger and wider project.

Bring the Values to Business!

The reports conversion initiative can be a great opportunity to review the existing reports and reporting framework including its management, administration, and maintenance process. You might be able to reduce huge numbers of the reports, which of course will have big impact on the maintenance and administration cost. Also, you might be able to optimize the reporting framework to server your business better. The new BI Publisher’s RTF Template base reporting design framework allows users to use their most familiar desktop tool, MS-Word, to design the reports layout, which means you can involve the end users to design the reports layout and formatting in more collaborative form and reduce a turn around time to meet their requirements. With the BI Publisher’s RTF Template’s flexible layout/formatting and calculation support, there might be some of the requirements that couldn’t have been done before but now can be done easily. BI Publisher’s separation of data and layout layers development approach allows developers or designers to work off-line mode so that they can work anywhere and anytime.

So here is, ‘6 Keys to Deliver Successful Reports Conversion Project’!

1. Clear Objectives and Value Proposition

It’s very important to set the objectives for the reports conversion project. Why are we doing the conversion ? Is that only because Actuate support will be expired soon ? Oracle has made the decision of converting the old reporting technology to the new BI Publisher base reporting system because there are significant benefits that would server our customers better. And such benefits should be able to be translated to ‘How can those benefits serve our business better?’

Such questions lead to a set of answers which should drive the reports requirements definition and reports and reporting system design. And they can be a base guideline for all the activities during the project hence it helps leading the project team together and deliver a consistent result.

2. Requirements, Requirements, Requirements!

Even though it might take an extra time at the beginning before you start the conversion itself it would be really beneficial for both the business and IT sides to collect and review the reporting requirements based on today’s business environment, and define the requirements in a form that both the business and IT can agree upon. And this will be a baseline for the whole reports conversion exercise including the design, development, system testing, UAT(User Acceptance Testing).

Also before you start the reports conversion you want to analyze the requirements to see how to implement them with this new BI Publisher base reporting technology.

3. Gap Analysis and Solutions Development based on Best Practice

You have two different technologies, old reporting system and new reporting system. This means two different methodology to implement a same requirement.  When you find the gaps between the old and new technology and develop solutions for them then they should be shared with other developers and projects so that each developer won’t need to invent the wheel every time. Also sometimes you might have possibly many ways to implement a same requirement with BI Publisher, so it’s important to analyze which options would be the best and why. These solutions can be used for many requirements and have huge impact on both maintenance and performance.

This analysis requires BI Publisher’s expert and best practice but once you have established that then the conversion process itself would be less stressful and most importantly more predictable hence easier to plan and less surprise!

3. Incremental Release, Not Big Ban

When you need to convert many reports, for example, 100 reports, it would be better to separate into small chunk of the reports sets and have a different releases schedule, maybe by department, by audience type, by reporting type, or by priority. In this way the business can recognize the value of the conversion initiative sooner and can provide valuable feedback that might have impact on the conversion strategy and reports design methodology. Again, you are going to bring a great value to your business by delivering this conversion initiative so close and continuous collaborative working relationship with the business is critical and it’s important to check if the work is aligning with the objectives and serving your business better. By focusing on a smaller user audience not just you can deliver the converted reports sooner and support them better but also you can have them on your side to promote the initiative to bigger audience for your next phases of the project. I would say three months would be typically the maximum to deliver. If it goes more than that then the business requirements would be changed and harder to manage them hence more chance to deliver something that can not serve your users.

4. Right Resource at Right Place

By this time I’m sure you’re fully aware of it, but again, the reports conversion is not just a magic that is supported by some kind of technology or methodology. It involves many phases and different types of works in order to deliver it successfully as the same way you deliver a reports development or any other projects. Therefore it requires different types of resources and you want to allocate them at a right timing and a right place and with right combination. Here is a list of the resources that would contribute the success.

• Project Manager
• Business Users/Analyst
• Functional Developers who are familiar with the backend application and the source tables such as EBS, Siebel, PSFT, JD Edward, etc.
• BI Publisher - BI Publisher has many technology but you want this BI Publisher resources who have extensive experience especially in RTF Template development

And of course, usual resource requirements for any project delivery applies such as project sponsors, system administrators/DBA, etc.

5. Well Thought and Active User Support

Again, the reports conversion will introduce a new reporting system to your users who have already accustomed to the older reporting system. The way they look at the reporting has already been established on the older system. So it will be high possibility that the users will get confused or start building a negative impact on the initiative. It’s important to understand how the users are running their reports and managing them today from their perspective. And starting from the perspective we need to identify what would be the gaps in terms of the usability and reporting procedure and build a custom training plan to address such gaps. Also, the benefits of what the new reporting system can offer often not been recognized fully by the end users or even by the developers! So it is important to translate the benefits into their daily business environment and educate the values with their language. And if you start with a smaller release with a limited number business users then they can help you to develop such training and to translate and sell the values to the business.

Also, it would help if you start hosting a user support group session at weekly or monthly where the users can throw questions or discuss requirements and solutions. What we have internally is a wiki site where we post any tips/techniques, best practice, FAQ, troubleshooting guide, which we’ve found through the development/conversion exercise to share with others. This is helpful especially when you think about scaling the development/conversion works so the more development work goes the more knowledge and experience you have as a whole team which can translate to reduce the delivery time and cost. So it’s something like ‘Center of Excellence’ as some people call it. But note that hosting such wiki site or ‘Center of Excellence’ will take a leadership effort and commitment, otherwise it will be forgotten after a few weeks, I’m sure you have seen this before! But when it works it really brings an amazing impact.

6. Project Management

Lastly it requires a sounds project management, but that is something that I don’t think I need to emphasize especially at here. Nothing is different, all the methodologies of project management will help to deliver the reports conversion project successfully as it does for any kind of projects.

Actuate to BI Publisher Reports Conversion for Siebel – Part 2

Yesterday, we were looking at how to convert Actuate reports to BI Publisher by using the Conversion Assistant tool. Now you got the Actuate reports converted to BI Publisher reports. The next step is how to enable the BI Publisher reports in Siebel application. I’m going to talk about the steps to upload and register the BI Publisher RTF Template files and associate them with relevant Siebel Views today.

Registering BI Publisher Report for Siebel

Once the RTF Template files are ready then you want to upload them to Siebel application and register them with appropriate Integration Objects.

Here is a list of the steps required to register the RTF Template files.

1. Login to Siebel application
2. In the Siebel application, navigate to the ‘Administration - BIP Reports’ screen, then ‘Report Template Registration’ view.
   
   
   
3. In the ‘Report Template Registration’ view, click New.
4. In the ‘Report Template Registration’ list, type a report name and optionally a description.
5. Select the RTF Template file, and then fill in the rest of the fields.

   Filed	Description
   Template	The RTF report template
   Primary Integration Object	The primary integration object for the report. The Primary Integration Object field is automatically populated when you select an integration object in the Report Template Integration Object list. This field is read-only in the Report Template Registration list.
   Output Type	Format of the generated report. Choices are: PDF, HTML, RTF, EXCEL, PPT, or All.
   XLIFF	XLIFF files contain the strings of the report column, field labels, and captions that are used for translation purposes.
   Start Date	A start date for the report.
   End Date	An end date for the report. After the end date passes, the report no longer appears in the Reports Menu.

   Once you fill in the above information now you need to associate a primary integration object for the report

6. Select the Report Template Integration Objects view tab, and then click New.
7. Fill in the fields in the new record.
   
   The fields are described in the following table.
   
   

   Field	Description
   Integration Object Name	Name of an integration object.
   Search Specification	This is required only when you have multiple integration objects.
   Primary	Indicates this integration object is the primary integration object.

   
   
8. Perform one of the following:
   A: In connected mode, click Upload Files. (The report template (RTF) and XLIFF files are uploaded.)
   B: In disconnected mode, click Generate XLIFF. (The report template (RTF), XLIFF, and XSL files are uploaded.)

Associate Registered Report with Siebel Application View

After uploading and registering the RTF Template file, you need to associate the report with a Siebel application view so that the users can select the report from the context-sensitive Reports Menu on the associated view page.

Here is a list of the steps required to associate a registered report with a Siebel application view

1. Navigate to the ‘Administration - BIP Reports’ screen, then ‘View Association’ view
   
   
   
2. In the Views list, select a view for which you want to associate a report
3. In the Reports List view, click ‘Add’
   
   
   
4. In the Views dialog box, choose a report name, and then click OK

The report is now available in the Reports Menu drop-down list when you are in the view you have just associated with. Now you want to test this newly added report to see if it works in the Siebel application.

 

Conclusion

Now you have seen how to convert Actuate reports to BI Publisher reports and deliver them in the Siebel application. You can use the Reports Conversion Assistant Utility to convert the Actuate reports to BI Publisher RTF Template, but there are many manual processes getting involved to complete the whole conversion as pretty much the case as any other type of conversion/migration exercise. I have already stated this at the ‘Oracle Reports Migration to BI Publisher in EBS’ post, but I can’t emphasize enough that it’s very critical to set clear objectives on ‘why we are converting all the reports?’ and ‘what values we are bringing into our business?’.  And based on the objectives we need to set a migration strategy and an appropriate project plan.

So I’d like to take a moment to talk about what are the keys to deliver the reports conversion projects successfully, regardless if it’s from Oracle Reports, Actuate, Crystal Reports, on tomorrow. So, stay tuned!

Actuate to BI Publisher Reports Conversion for Siebel – Part 1

Actuate to BI Publisher for Siebel

As you have seen in the previous posts the Siebel Reporting with BI Publisher architecture uses BI Publisher only for the reports layout generation, not for the data generation. It uses the Integration Objects, which are metadata objects in Siebel Business Applications that provide the ability to obtain Siebel data in XML format, within EAI Siebel Adapter to retrieve the data from the Siebel database. And this two layers of the report generation architecture is pretty much the same way as before with Actuate base reporting. Actuate has been used to handle the report layout with Actuate Design file (ROD) and generate report outputs based on data returned by the Integration Objects.

So the reports conversion will focus only for the layout part of the reports and that means you will take care of only the BI Publisher RTF Template side of business.

By converting the layout part of the report you can take advantage of BI Publisher’s easy and flexible development framework and better performance and scalability for the reports generation.

Conversion Process

Here is a list of steps required for the Actuate to BI Publisher reports conversion for Siebel.

1. Obtain Actuate Report File
2. Convert Actuate Report File to BI Publisher RTF Template File
3. Review the converted file and Adjust/Update
4. Upload the RTF Template and Register
5. Associate the RTF Template with View

Reports Conversion Assistant Utility

When you start thinking about the conversion process, the first question would be if there is any conversion tool available or do we need to convert one report by one manually ? The answer is, Yes, there is a conversion tool available, which is called BI Publisher Actuate Reports Conversion Assistant. It converts the Actuate report files (BAS) to the BI Publisher RTF Template files.

How to Get the Conversion Assistant Utility?

You can get this tool from the metalink.

1. Go to the metalink.
2. Go to Patches & Downloads tab
3. Click on the Oracle, Siebel and Hyperion Products link
4. Click on Simple Search
5. Enter patch number 8968224 in the Search by Patch Number/Name box
6. Pick generic platform and click 'Go' (You should see files for download)

Before you start the conversion process make sure you have downloaded the above tool and locate to an appropriate folder.

How Much Can be Automatically Converted

The Conversion Assistant does the conversion for the basic objects but not for all. And often that you need to manually add or implement some of the functionality in the RTF Template files based on the original Actuate reports. This is due to different ways to achieve a same functionality between the two products (Actuate vs. BI Publisher).

You can find such objects that are not converted after the conversion by looking into the log file, which is also generated by the tool. The log file indicates the functions in the Actuate reports that are not converted with label names and you can find such label names in the generated RTF file with a tag like ‘<!--->’ as place holders.

Also, you want to review the report layout to see if the layout in the RTF template is matching the original report layout or newly defined reports layout requirements. In order to review the report layout you can preview the report with actual reporting data in a desired format such as PDF quite easily, instead of just looking at the RTF template, by using the BI Publisher MS Word Add-in tool called Template Builder.

How to Use the Conversion Assistant Tool?

The Actuate Reports Conversion Assistant is a Java command line tool and it requires JDK 1.5 or later. The conversion tool takes BAS file as an input therefore you need to generate the BAS file from the original ROD file first before you start the conversion. The below image illustrates the conversion workflow by the Conversion Assistant.

The Conversion Assistant takes the following input parameters.

Parameter	Description
-i	Input file name – BAS file name
-o	Output file name – RTF Template fille name
-l	Log file name

And the syntax to convert a single report is:

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

You can also convert multiple files together and the syntax to convert multiple reports together is:

run –i <Folder_path_for_bas_files> -o <Folder_path_for_RTF_Files>

The above command will read all the files in the <Folder_path_for_bas_files> location and put the converted files with corresponding names in the <Folder_path_for_RTF_Files> location. By default a log file is created at location <Folder_path_for_RTF_Files>.

Review and Adjust Converted RTF Template

As mentioned above, the conversion assistant does the conversion from Actuate to BI Publisher RTF Template but in most cases it still requires manual adjustments. You can review the log file which indicates all the functions from the original Actuate report that are not converted. Also you can open the RTF Template file with the Template Builder (BI Publisher’s MS-Word Add-in tool), load the sample XML data file, and preview the report output to see if the final report output is meeting the business requirements. When you review the RTF Template file the followings are the typical items that requires such manual adjustments.

• Layout
• Formatting (Color, Number formatting, Date formatting, etc)
• Calculation/Aggregation
• Condition
• Image (including company logo)

When you review the template files it is very important to compare with the newly defined requirements definition, which is agreed with business users who will consume the reports. There might be some logics or formatting in the report which are not relevant today’s business process. There might be some new requirements that are important today but not in the original report. Often that reports developers are given the original reports and they try to mimic the original reports for their adjustments and end up spending a lot of time for something that is not even required anymore. That’s why it is critical to have the requirement collection, analysis, and definition first even for this type of reports conversion project and make sure the all the developers who will work on the conversion process would crystal clearly understand the requirements and share how to address the gaps between the Actuate and BI Publisher.

How to Get XML Data File

One more thing for reviewing the report outputs to perform the manual adjustments. As mentioned above, you can use the Template Builder to preview the report outputs with sample data within MS-Word without connecting to the database or Siebel system. In order to preview the report outputs, you need to get a sample XML data file for each report first. You can generate the XML data file from the integration object for which you want to prepare a BI Publisher report. Here are the steps to obtain the XML data file.

1. Login to Siebel application
2. Navigate to the ‘Administration - BIP Reports’ screen, then ‘Sample Data File Generation’ view.
3. In the Sample Data File Generation list, select the integration object for which you want to generate a data file, and then click Generate Data File.

An XML file will be generated with the name of the integration object followed by .xml. For example, if the integration object name is BIP Literature Fulfillment, the file name for the XML file is BIP Literature Fulfillment.xml.

Now you know how to convert the Actuate report files to BI Publisher RTF Template files. In order to generate Siebel reports with the converted BI Publisher RTF Template files you need to upload the RTF Template files and register them, and associate them with related Siebel Views so that the users can generate the reports from the relevant UI. I will talk about these process tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Running BI Publisher Reports in Siebel

After the previous post, now you know how BI Publisher is integrated within the Siebel architecture as the reporting platform. The next question would be, ‘how to run the BI Publisher reports in Siebel?’ and that is the question I’m going to address today. But it’s really a simple process to run the reports. Siebel application is all Web UI so you can login to Siebel application and navigate to a view (UI) where you want to generate a report for. Within a view you can click a ‘Reports’ icon which will show you a list of the reports accessible from the view.

Siebel Reports Menu

Under ‘BIP’ section you can view a list of the reports that are associated with the current view. You can click one of the listed reports to run the report. Or you can select ‘My BI Publisher Reports’ to see a list of previously run reports, which are saved on the Siebel server.

My Report List View

Once you select one of the reports a dialog box will pop up where you can select the report output such as PDF, HTML, etc.

You can select one of the report output format type and it will generate a report in the specified format and display.

And here is a reporting work flow diagram.

Well, it’s that simple. But the key is that you can access to only the reports that have been associated with the view you are current at. So somebody has to set that up for you before you start running the reports. And that is something that I will talk about as part of the ‘Actuate to BI Publisher Reports Conversion’ topic, which will follow tomorrow, so stay tuned!