Wednesday, July 22, 2015

OBIEE 11.1.1.7 and 11.1.1.9 without flash in HTML5 and PNG formats

At the moment using Flash Player is sometimes considered vulnerability. Some browser temporary disable it or threaten to do it, until the solution is found. I'll talk about Using OBIEE 11.1.1.7 and 11.1.1.9 without Flash. 



For 11.1.1.9 Andrew (BIsoftDiary.com) did a great job covering it in his post OBIEE: HTML5 charts instead of flash charts. He suggests to add the line <DefaultWebImageType>HTML5</DefaultWebImageType>  under views -> Charts in instanceconfig.xml. (See few more steps of service restarting and browser issue in his blog).
This option was described in 11.1.1.9 new features here.

All possible options of DefaulWebImageType are:
  • flash - In a browser that does not support the flash format, the image does not render. You should use the html5 value instead.
  • png (W3C Portable Network Graphics)
  • svg (W3C Scalable Vector Graphics) The svg value is not supported in this release, so flash is used if svg is specified.
  • html5 - In a browser that does not support the html5 format, the image renders in the flash format instead.
 Flash, png, and html5 images provide the greatest degree of interaction because they support mouse-over behaviors (such as popup data labels), navigation, and drilling. 

The only new feature in the 11.1.1.9 is the html5 option. 
For 11.1.1.7 we can use the png option with almost no problems. The png option supports drilling on graphs and most of the critical functionality, but can't do sliders.

In the example the Years column is at the Section level in the graph. I can mark the slider.


In HTML5 format it looks fine:
In 11.1.1.7 if we don't want the default flash, we are limited to png format that doesn't support sliders:


P.S.

If you are testing it, don't do the tests on the default Sample Sales dashboards.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Few MAD links and Android Mobile Application "OK Google" option.

Few links relevant to Oracle BI MAD (Mobile Application Designer) news and link about the Mobile Application on Android with voice control. 

1. The MAD2 for OBIEE 11.1.1.7,  patch 20860133 downloadable here and described here.




 

 3. Apparently, on Oracle Mobile BI application for Android you can say ‘OK Google, Search BI Mobile for Keyword and the app will open with a list of reports that match the keyword you specified! See link here

Link to "Security patches released for OBIEE & ODI" post at Rittman Mead

This is a link to the post by Robin Moffatt at Rittman Mead blog: Security patches released for OBIEE 11.1.1.7/11.1.1.9, and ODI DQ 11.1.1.3

Thanks Robin!

Please read there first.

The relevant OBIEE patch links are:
11.1.1.9 - Patch 21235195
11.1.1.7 - 11.1.1.7.150714 in Patch 21103263

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

OBIEE BUNDLE PATCH 11.1.1.7.150714 AKA 11.1.1.7.11 (?) is available

Please note OBIEE Bundle Patch 11.1.1.7.151020 is available. You might prefer it.

OBIEE 11.1.1.7 new general bundle patch (number 11?), 11.1.1.7.150714 is available in Patch 21103263, it can be installed on any previous 11.1.1.7 release.



The Patch is platform specific and is available for:
  • HP-UX Itanium
  • IBM AIX on POWER Systems (64-bit)
  • Linux x86
  • Linux x86-64
  • MS Windows (32-bit)
  • MS Windows (64-bit)
  • Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit)
  • Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit)

You can read the readme file here.
If you check carefully, the only new component when comparing to 11.1.1.7.150120 is patch
21235729.

Patch
Abstract
16913445
Oracle Business Intelligence Installer (BIINST) -same as previous patchset
19822893
Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BIP) -same as previous patchset
19825503
Enterprise Performance Management Components Installed from BI Installer 11.1.1.7.0 (BIFNDNEPM) -same as previous patchset
19822857
Oracle Business Intelligence Server (BISERVER) -same as previous patchset
19822826
Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services (BIPS) -same as previous patchset
19823874
Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) -same as previous patchset
16997936
Oracle Business Intelligence ADF Components (BIADFCOMPS) -same as previous patchset
20022695
Oracle Business Intelligence Platform Client Installers and MapViewer -same as previous patchset
21235729
Oracle Business Intelligence Third Party

As usual there is a bonus patch: Patch 16569379  (1111770)- Dynamic Monitoring Service patch. It is platform dependent. If you installed it with 11.1.1.7.1 or later, that's enough. It's the same.


Bugs fixes 

Oracle Business Intelligence Third Party

 Fix For Bug  20247002

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

OBIEE - Controlling the Date format

Different countries use different date formats. Most of them are logical. The Default in OBIEE is the American way. Lets see how can we change it.



My customer wanted the the date in European format and stay with English interface.
 

Option 1:

 The default option is to change the settings for each user in My Account:

And set the locale to a proper one. 

For example this is English United States:
This is English UK:
This is Russian dates:

When you change to non English locale, and want the user Interface in English, remember to change that back, since it changes automatically (in this example to Russian).
 



Option 2:

When I don't want to bother with My Account, I can try brute force by changing localedefinitions.xml (located at MWHOME/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/web/display).


Find there:

 <localeDefinition name="en">              <!-- english base -->

and there change:

<property name="dateShortFormat">M/d/yyyy</property>
 <property name="dateLongFormat">dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy</property>

to

<property name="dateShortFormat">dd/MM/yyyy</property>
 <property name="dateLongFormat">dddd, dd MMMM, yyyy</property>



Just remember it might be restored to default after patches.