[OBIEE 11g] Displaying External Documents On An OBIEE Dashboard

 

Displaying External Documents on an OBIEE Dashboard

The requirement is to host externally-generated PDF reports in OBIEE and have them display alongside their other OBI content. They also wanted these files to be searchable by name like the rest of elements comprising the web catalog. To achieve this requires a few steps and a bit of trickery to expose one of OBIEE’s internal urls. Here we go…

Firstly I created a folder to house the external files. Navigate to ‘Catalog’, click the ‘New’ dropdown menu icon and choose ‘Folder’.

Enter the desired name of your folder.

With the new folder highlighted in the right pane of the Catalog manager, an option for ‘Upload’ appears in the bottom left hand Tasks area. This is how we get the external files into the web catalog.

Now to get the files to appear on a dashboard page. For this you can either add an ‘Action Link’ object to your page or – as I’ve done here – a ‘Link or Image’ object. Drag this from the left hand side of the screen in the usual way.

Edit the properties. Enter some text in the caption field – this becomes the link text. Select the URL radio button and now you’re ready to enter the URL. Here we use Presentation Services’ internal mechanism for presenting files for download. It requires that you translate the path to your file to url encode all the special characters. The format for my example is:

http://server-name:9704/analytics/saw.dll?downloadFile&path=%2Fshared%2FPDFs%2FFilename.pdf

Note that I also added a url to a pdf icon in the image box and set it to show to the left of the caption.

That’s all there is to it. View the dashboard and test the link. Hopefully your external file will begin to download.