[OBIEE 10g] Web Catalog

WEB CATALOG IN OBIEE 10G

It is a good practice to start a new project in a new web catalog. Web Catalog is a just like a directory where we can place all our project related stuff(reports, filters, dashboards, prompts etc).

  

 1.       To create a new web catalog, create a empty directory in the following directory path(where the OBI presentation Server is installed):

C:\OracleBIData\web\catalog 

   
2.      Now, edit the configuration file “instanceconfig.xml” to point to this new directory. instanceconfig.xml is located in the following directory path :

Now open and add your new directory name in catalog path.

3.Then restart the presentation server service. When the presentation server sees a empty directory , it    will create a necessary directory structure within it. 

    3.       The Presentation Server creates the directory structure  as –

It creates a root directory under which creates three sub directories(shared, system, user) where each subdirectories are used for specific reasons.

User : The Presentation Server creates a subfolder for each user that registers in the web catalog in this folder.

 Shared : The shared folder is used to save and organize the dashboards, reports, prompts  ect .We can’t save any report, prompt or dashboard directly in this folder unless creating subfolder.

    4.      To save these items we must create subfolder under  this shared folder.

How you structure sub-folders under the shared folder really a question of how the system will be used. We  might create one folder per dashboard, and place all the requests used by that dashboard within that folder, keeping things simple for when you want to apply security.

For example:  Sales Dashboard.

We can create a subfolder called Sales using Catalog Manager or directly in presentation services.

Creating  subfolder using catalog manager:

• Open the Catalog Manager.
• Go to file and select open catalog.
• Provide the URL, user name and Password then click OK.
• Then open the shared folder and create the subfolder Sales.

 Creating  subfolder using Presentation Services :

While saving the requests or dashboard we can create subfolders under the share folder by clicking “Create Folder” button.  

Now we can save reports, prompts, dashboards related to Sales department in the Sales subfolder.

     5.       If there are number of departments that are using  OBIEE,  then we can provide security for any department’s dashboards from other departments users by creating  web catalog “groups” and “web folder” .

The simple way to create these groups is to use the Add/Edit Group function with the web-based Presentation Services Administration screen.

In our case we have already created a web folder called “Sales”, now we will create a group called “Sales”.

     6.       Now we   can set the permissions to the “Sales folder”  using Catalog Manager.  Open the Catalog Manager and right click on the Sales folder. Then click on Permissions.

If you wish to allow only Sales group users to access the sales related dashboards then remove Everyone from and add Sales group to Users and groups(Explicit permissions) tab.

Now, only the sales group has permission to Sales folder, no other group has permission to this folder except Presentation Server Administrator.

 Like this we can create different group folders and group for different departments.

   
    7.       The dashboards can be saved in group folders. That is if the dashboard is of Sales department then we can save it in Sales group folder or if the dashboard is related to Marketing department then we can save it in Marketing  group folder. 

      8.       Enable drop-down menus for dashboards within each catalog group:
 
Each department can then set up it’s own dashboards, requests, alerts and filters within its own shared, group folder (or indeed, create subfolders for specific areas of analysis). If departments end up creating lots of dashboards, the Presentation Server will automatically show them in a drop-down list with the group folder as the menu name once the number of visible dashboards for a user is fifteen or more. You can control this setting by adding a <DashboardMaxBeforeMenu> tag to the instanceconfig.xml file; I typically set it to 1 on real projects so that all departmental dashboards are shown in drop-down menus.