Integrating Oracle BI Answers and Oracle Portal

One bit of feedback I received after running my last BI seminar, was that people were interested in interoperability between the new BIEE tools and the Standard Edition tools they were currently using. Whilst most people were keen to hear about what’s new, the reality is that they need to take gradual steps and a “big bang” approach, migrating everything at once often isn’t realistic. If there's a way to get the old and new tools working together, at least for the time being, that'd be a useful situation.

With the current line up of Oracle’s BI tools - OBE 10.1.3.3 and Oracle BI SE 10.1.2.2 - there are in fact two main areas in which the tools can interoperate:

• Discoverer worksheets can be a data source for BI Publisher, and
• Oracle Answers reports can be displayed in Oracle Portal

Strictly speaking, Portal integration has been available since back in the days of Siebel Analytics, but now all the products are in the same fold the documentation is easy to get hold of and OBIEE 10.1.3.2 and 10.1.3.3 ships with portlet provider that plugs straight in to Oracle Portal, using the JSR-168 WSRP standard.

The way it works is that Answers views, the graphs, tables, pivot tables and so on that are built against data in the BI Server repository, can be rendered through Oracle Portal with all the interactivity, presentation and so on that you get in Interactive Dashboards. There's a few prerequisities and a bit of configuration to go through, but once it's all up and running it's easy to bring Answers content into Portal, arguably easier than Discoverer worksheets when you think about all the work involved in refreshing content, managing connections and so on.

Setting up Answers and Portal integration consists of the following steps:

• First of all, you need to install Oracle Application Server 10.1.2 (docs, software) and upgrade Portal to 10.1.4 (upgrade docs, software
• Next, download the Oracle Portlet Container from OTN, which is needed in order to deploy JSR-168 portlets in Oracle Portal 10.1.4
• Once you’ve upgraded Portal and download the Portlet Container, create a new OC4J container to hold your WSRP portlets, and then follow in the instructions in the Portlet Container download to copy across a JAR file and use Application Server Control to deploy it in the new WSRP OC4J container.
• Now that Portal's configured, you go across to the Oracle BIEE 10.1.3.2 or 10.1.3.3 installation and get hold of a file called "sawjsr168portlets.war" in the /OracleBI/web/sdk directory, which then needs to be unpacked and a file called "portlet.xml" extracted, which you then edit to provide the credentials for the BI Presentation Server. Once you're repacked the .war file, you then upload it to the WSRP container and deploy as an application.
• The final configuration step is then to register the OBIEE WSRP details with Portal as a remote provider, once you've done that you can start adding OBIEE portlets into your Portal page.

Starting with a blank Portal page, adding an Answers portlet involves creating a region and then pressing the "Add Item" button in the Edit Page view, then browsing the Portlet repository to find the Answers provider, which I've called "Analytics" in this example:

After adding the Oracle Business Intelligence Report View Portlet, the portlet is initially in an unconfigured state, and you need to add the path to the view and the view type:

The portlet provides two text fields for providing these parameters:

This is where it's slightly tricky. As this is a fairly early example of integration, there's no "report picker" or similar dialog to help you select a report, you have to go back to the Catalog Manager is OBIEE to find the report, and more importantly it's catalog path, to key into the first text box.

Going back to Answers, I find the report I want within the Course folder within Paint Demo and Shared Folders, and translating the physical path address below it, I come back with the view address "/shared/Paint Demo/Course/Units and Sales By Brand".

I key this into the two portal configuration fields, like this:

Now, I can save the portal details and take a look at how it looks.

And there we go - a full Answers view, but displayed within Portal. As far as I'm aware, you can pass parameters to it, it can pick up on who the logged in Portal user is and thereafter scope the data, you can even drill, download to Excel and so on. Not bad.

I'm currently working on the Discoverer and BI Publisher integration stuff - this is a bit trickier, as it seems that Discoverer, BI Publisher and OBIEE all need to be within Oracle Single Sign-On (assuming BIP and BIEE are running integrated) to get it working - Disco must be linked in to OID for the Public Connections the Disco Web Service uses, which has a cascade effect on BI Publisher and OBIEE which also need to be within SSO to be able to talk to Disco. I'm working through it now and hopefully I'll update the blog on how I get on over the weekend. For now though, the Portal integration works just nicely, once you get Portal working with WSRP portlets its pretty much plain sailing after that.