Configuring Application Server 10gR2 For Discoverer Portlets

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.