Friday, December 12, 2008

OBIEE MetaData Dictionary

The metadata dictionary is a very powerful support package within OBIEE. Sadly it is not commonly used at this moment. This is mainly caused by the fact that the functionality is very poorly documented by Oracle.
This article describes the configuration and implementation of the OBIEE metadata dictionary both on an OC4J and an IIS web services. (Other web services can be easily configured based on of these systems)

Prerequisites

The account used for implementing this functionality must have full access to:

  • The source repositories


  • The Presentation server.


  • The Web server.

Generating the metadata dictionary

Open the repository in Offline mode:
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Go to tools utilities:
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Select Generate Metadata Dictionary:
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Select a destination directory:
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On successful finish you will get:
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If you are replacing you might get this:
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Navigate to your {OBIEE MetaData Dictionary}\ {repository_name}
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Open NameIndex in a browser to check the readability.
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Open TreeIndex in a browser to check the readability.
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OC4J Prerequisites

First we have to tell the presentation server where to find the dictionary. This is configured in the INSTANCECONFIG.XML file. Usually this file is found in {OracleBIDate}\web\config.
Open the file and add:
<SubjectAreaMetadata>
<DictionaryURLPrefix>/analytics/dictionary/</DictionaryURLPrefix>
</SubjectAreaMetadata>
between the <WebConfig> tags.
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WOW: Some OBIEE config tags and the contents are CaSe SeNsItIvE!

OC4J web server

Create the “dictionary” directory in the analytics application folder:
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Usually {OracleBI}\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\application\analytics\analytic. (it’s the folder where your SAW.DLL is located).
Copy the content of your dictionary export folder to this folder:
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Restart the presentation server
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Log in as administrator in answer, select the subject area:
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Click on the dictionary symbol:
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ISS Prerequisites

Create a new virtual directory in your IIS manager
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Add the virtual directory to your INSTANCECONFIG.XML. Usually this file is found in {OracleBIDate}\web\config.
<SubjectAreaMetadata>
<DictionaryURLPrefix>/analyticsDictionary/</DictionaryURLPrefix>
</SubjectAreaMetadata>
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WOW: Some OBIEE config tags and the contents are CaSe SeNsItIvE!
Restart the presentation server
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Log in as administrator in answer, select the subject area:
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Click on the dictionary symbol:
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Granting access to the metadata dictionary

Log in as administrator
Go Settings > Administration
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Select manage privileges:
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Select access to Metadata Dictionary

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By default this is set to everyone.
Till Next Time
This article was orignally written for the Ciber knowledge blog: http://knowledge.ciber.nl/weblog/
EDIT: This Feature is availible from 10.3.4

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just thought I would qualify your helpful posting by saying that version 10.1.3.2 doesn't have this feature. I assume you are on 10.1.3.4?

John Minkjan said...

Hi John,

You are right it's availble from 10.1.3.4

regards

eejimkos said...

Hello,
just trying your example....
.
for oc4j,i believe that
In instanceconfig,xml
--->
"<"SubjectAreaMetadata>
"<"DictionaryURLPrefix>
*****/analytics/dictionary***
**but just --> /dictionary***



Tnks,ur blog is extremely usefull..

ramiro kollmannsperger said...

hello
i just had one tiny problem with the setup: in the OC4J Prerequisites you tell to make an entry in the INSTANCECONFIG.XML file to set the DictionaryURLPrefix for the SubjectAreaMetadata:

You set it to "/analytics/dictionary"

Now, to make it work, i had to add a slash after "/analytics/dictionary"

so in my case i used:
/analytics/dictionary/

and then it worked beautifully!

thanks for this great howto, i wanted to write something about this myself but when i came across this entry it proved unnecessary.
regards,

John Minkjan said...

@ramiro kollmannsperger

Thanks for the tip, I will change the text.

regards

John

Anonymous said...

John
we are trying to automate this solution using a batch script but we are getting these popups saying that "the metadata generation was successfully generated" and the other popup as "Do you want to delete the existing dictionary?". How can we automate this solution where these popups does not come up so that its a completely scripted process.

Thanks in advance
kris

Anonymous said...

Nicely written..step by steps!..very useful data about metadata :)

abhinav kachhwaha said...

Hi,

I have gone through steps mentioned by you.

above solution is working fine in my local machine but when migrate same code in the server it is displaying blank page without any error.

Please suggest.

Abhinav

Sai Prakash K said...

Hi John,

You are right it's available from 10.1.3.4

regards

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