February 16, 2010

'Admin' tab missing in BI Publisher installed as a part of OBIEE

"Shalini, Shalini [somehow incharge of entire BI Publisher in team] ! Where are you? [Kill this girl :-$ at once only] Can't you see set up done by you yesterday in XYZ's machine is not working ? What the hell you people do?" 

Well, the above panic statement was created at the moment my workstation got started today morning :| Now let me make the problem clear with its solution which luckily somehow come up in 5 minutes.

Problem: I installed BI Publisher latest version 10.1.3.4.1 in a machine being aware of the fact that OBIEE [An integrated Oracle BI suite that provides BI Publisher as its components] Inspite of ding installation in separate directory, somehow my installed BI Publisher and its related stuff worked perfectly fine but unfortunately OBIEE related work couldn't work. I am just guessing the reason might be because of too much security , some configuration files would have got over written my installation [only a guess, as per my stupid logic, it should not have happened] Anyway, I did my part and left office as usual happily. Some very intelligent dude, after seeing that OBIEE is not working, uninstalled everything and then again installed it but after that my installation got messed up and it stopped working. Let's keep this mess aside. Conclusion is none of the two, neither OBIEE nor standalone BI installed worked fine. 

Solution: Being a lazy fellow in doing work and always keeping an eye in saving time. I didn't want to take the headache of installing my BI Publisher again. So I followed following few simple steps and voila everything worked within 15 minutes 
STEP 1: Unistalled entire standalone installed BI Publisher completely from the system including folder and everything.
Result: Atleast OBIEE was working at this point.

Now instead of installing BI Publisher separately I thought of using the one provided in OBIEE(without caring for its version)

STEP 2: I tried accessing its GUI using this url. URL worked but 'Admin' tab was missing in the dahsboard of BI Publisher GUI screen. After all this tab is most important for doing all settings.
STEP 3: I checked that if I change following SECURITY_MODEL property in xmlp-server-config.xml configuration file at "{ORA_HOME}\xmlp\XMLP\Admin\Configuration", everything started working.
Original and Default value set up in OBIEE set up
Modified value done in order to make 'Admin' tab accessible in GUI

Changing SECURITY_MODEL from BI_SERVER to XDO, we are telling making BI Publisher to run as a standalone application.