Saturday, July 16, 2011

OBIEE11g Multi Skin and Style Deployment

Before you read any further, start with reading the Oracle white paper :

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi/customizing-oracle-biee-11g-176387.pdf

I don’t like doing any customisation within the weblogic server. First of all the paths are always long: d:\obiee11g\instances\instance1\bifoundation\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1. Second, it’s very easy to loose you work when doing a reinstall….

Let’s start with create a new folder called OBIEE_LAF (OBIEE Look and Feel).

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In this example i’m going to make 3 different Skins and Styles for 3 different companies (A, B and C). I made a copy from the original S_ & SK_blafp:

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Keep the name lower case and without spaces!!

Next we have to tell the server that it is a application directory. Copy the WEB-INF folder from <<OBIEE_HOME>>\instances\instancen\bifoundation\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\analyticsRes to your LAF Folder:

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Log in to the console > deployments and press the lock & edit button

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Next press the install button:

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Select the LAF folder:

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Select install this deployment as a library

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Deploy it to a bi server

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Check I will make the deployment accessible from the following location:

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Press Finish

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Press activate changes

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Check if it’s started:

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Let’s check if it is reachable:

companya

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companyb

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companyc

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Let’s tell the INSTANCECONFIG.XML what to do:

 

<!-- My Custom Stuff -->

<URL>
<CustomerResourcePhysicalPath>D:\OBIEE_LAF</CustomerResourcePhysicalPath>
<!-- CustomerResourcePhysicalPath is a tag that specifies the actual target directory name -->
<CustomerResourceVirtualPath>/OBIEE_LAF</CustomerResourceVirtualPath>
<!-- CustomerResourceVirtualPath provides the URLPrefix that will be added for sourcing all the files -->
<!-- If we don’t give this tag, BI EE will automatically add analyticsRes (System target directory) -->
</URL>
<UI>
<DefaultStyle>companya</DefaultStyle>
<!-- Without the S_ -->
<DefaultSkin>companya</DefaultSkin>
<!-- Without the SK_ -->
</UI>
</ServerInstance>

Till Next Time

4 comments:

Neil Saitug said...

Wow, what a timely post. I'm in the middle of customizing an OBIEE app.

I'm having trouble getting my changes to show up on the actual OBIEE dashboard. I've gotten through all the steps you listed above, and read through the white paper several times. Perhaps I'm configuring the wrong config file. Can you provide the full path to the instanceconfig.xml file?

Thanks again. Keep up the good posts.

Rudra455 said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

Hi John,
Great post! This info really helped me.
Kind regards,
Rinie

Unknown said...

Hi John --

Great post. Question, is there a way to host multiple CustomMessages directories?

Thanks,
Ben