Configuring Application Server 10gR2 For Discoverer Portlets

March 4th, 2005 by Mark Rittman

If you’ve read my OTN article

"Building BI Dashboards with Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Discoverer, and Oracle
Portal" and were looking to set a BI dashboard up, you might be wondering
how to set up OracleBI Discoverer so that it integrates in with Oracle Portal.
Whilst it’s not particularly tricky to set up, there are a number of steps you
need to go through, so I thought it worth noting them down here if anyone wants
to give it a go.

The first thing you need to do is to install Oracle Business Intelligence 10g
10.1.2, together with the Application Server 10g Infrastructure and Portal
tiers. If you haven’t done this already I made a few notes on this when AS10g
Release 2 came out, and the thing to bear in mind here is that, although you’ve
installed all the components (in my case, on the same laptop), the Business
Intelligence tier isn’t registered with the infrastructure and portal tiers by
default. What you need to do therefore is to tell the Business Intelligence tier
to "associate" with the infrastructure tier, so that they’re all managed as one
Application Server "Farm", and then afterwards make something called the
Discoverer Portlet Provider available as a service within Oracle Portal.

The first step then is to make sure you’ve got all three tiers -
Infrastructure, Portal and Business Intelligence, up and running, and ensure
that you can connect to the Infrastructure and Business Intelligence Enterprise
Manager websites. In my case, the relevant URLs were:

with the Business Intelligence 10g one being the lower port number (1810) as
I installed this tier first. Also, check that you can log in to portal and
Discoverer, with URLs being

The next step then is to associate our Business Intelligence tier with our Infrastructure
tier. You can read the full set of instructions for doing this in the
Application Server 10g online docs, at

http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/B14099_02/bi.1012/b13918/assoc.htm

Start up the Business Intelligence 10g Enterprise Manager website, click on the infrastructure tab,
and you will see two
buttons, one for configuring Identity Management, and one for configuring the Metadata
Repository.

Click on the Identity  Management button first, enter the host and port
number for your OID server (i.e
the one that comes with your Infrastructure), then finish the wizard. When that
is complete, click on the Metadata Repository button to select the database that
will hold your metadata (the 10g one that came with your infrastructure), then
finish off the wizard.

The OracleBI Discoverer installation is now associated with an Oracle
Application Server infrastructure. This means now that you can deploy Discoverer
with your other Application Server components (Portal, SSO etc), you can create
connections, and you can use the Discoverer Portlet Provider.

Now, when you go into Enterprise Manager for the Infrastructure tier, you should see your Business
Intelligence tier listed alongside the Infrastructure and Portal tiers.

The next step is to register the Discoverer portlet provider with Oracle
Portal. Again, full details on this are in the online docs at

http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/B14099_02/bi.1012/b13918/portal.htm#i1015673

First, check that the Discoverer portlet provider is working (you may have to
start up the Discoverer instance as the previous task may have left it turned
off) by bringing up the portlet provider URL at


http://server:port/discoverer/portletprovider (e.g.
http://markr/discoverer/portletprovider)

Log in to Portal, and click on the administrator tab, then the portlets
sub-tab. Click on the "Register a Provider" link, then enter "Discoverer01" as the name
(or any other unique provider name you choose), "Business Intelligence" as the
display name, provide a timeout limit and message, and select "Web" as the
implementation style.

Then, on the next page,

  1. enter the URL of the Discoverer Portlet Provider in the URL field (the
    one you used above), then
  2. clear the "Web Provider in same cookie domain
    as the portal" check box,
  3. select the "The user has the same identity in
    the Web providers application as in the Single Sign-On identity"
    radio button, and
  4. in the User/Session Information area, select the "User"
    radio button, and
  5. select the "Once Per
    User Session" option from the Login Frequency
    field.

Do not change the default value
of other fields. Your screen should look like:

On the next page (Grant Access) you can just accept the defaults and then
press Finish. After this, you should get confirmation that you have set up the
provider correctly, and then it’s just a case of creating a new portal page,
adding a portlet, navigating to the "Portlet Staging Area" section, selecting
"Business Intelligence" and then selecting the type of Discoverer portlet you
want to display.

Once you’re at this point you can start

working through the example in the OTN article, or for a more in-depth look
at Discoverer portlets, take a look at the

BI Dashboards viewlet demo or work through the

Oracle-By-Example tutorial.

Posted in Oracle Discoverer |

Comments are closed.