[OBIEE 11g] Saving RPD As XML Content

 

Saving OBIEE RPD As XML Content

This is how to use  SVN integration in Admin Tool.This helps to merge and diff RPD work from Admin Tool or versioning system of choice. It gives more choice such as which versioning system to use and independence from Oracle’s SVN feature set included in tool which is a subset of SVN anyways.

For now, versioning RPD files is a two-step process.  We still have to deploy binary RPD file.  The general idea is to convert RPD file into XML directory structure to put in your version control system of choice and convert back into binary to deploy.

Overview

Starting from your RPD file, go to File, then Copy As and save your work as MDS XML Documents…

Tool asks you to Select XML Directory to store the contents of RPD as XML.

Select your directory and press OK.

Instead of the RPD file, this directory is what we would put up in version control.  At this point, we would do all our work from this MDS XML Document directory.

Open this location now form Admin Tool.

Notice that now, Admin Tool states that we are working out of directory instead of RPD file

Inside the directory selected (or created), You end up with a directory structure of XML files.

And inside each directory, you end up with a list of XML files, one for each element of the directory in question.  I.E. – For the the Logical Table directory, you end up with an XML file per logical table in your model.

This is were it gets a bit tricky. There is no easy way to differentiate one of these XML files from the thousand of others in directory structure.  This will make diffing and merging this directory lots of labor.  Still, it is way better than MUD or multiple developers with inconsistent copies of an RPD file.

Since these files are XML, however, we can use our favorite editor or tool to, at least, inspect differences between iterations of our work.

I would be hesitant to do much editing of these files for fear of rendering them unusable by the Admin tool. At least we have backups now .

After you finish development (and pass review before committing), you will have to convert this XML directory back into RPD format to deploy.  OBIEE can only deploy (for now?) RPD.

This is the RPD representation of your, now versioned, model work.