analyticsRes - having your own place on the OBIEE server

This post is very unnecessary, it's covered quite well in the Oracle White paper: Customizing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g. Unfortunately, people get intimidated by the 12 pages it contains. the good news, we are interested here in only few of them.

Why do you want to deploy your own directory on the server? So you can keep your own staff there: Your customizations, your pictures, your java scripts... You might have lots of things you want to have handy at any moment you want them.

The process takes about 5 minutes and it's very useful (OK I need it to write few new posts and fix some old ones, using this option).

1. Login the weblogic console. 

(for my box named bdahab-lap, its http://bdahab-lap:7001/console/ )

2. Select Deployments on the left and press Lock & Edit. Now click the Install button.

3.  Enter the path to analyticsRes:

ORACLE_INSTANCE/bifoundation/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1

In my case it was:

D:\or\MWHOME\instances\instance1\bifoundation\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1

Now you are supposed to see analyticsRes.

Select it (the radio button).

Press next.

4. Accepts the default and press Next.

 5.If you have the following screen, select BI Server

6. And now comes the tricky part. The next screen requires you to actively select the option: I will make the deployment accessible from the following location and not just click next.

Now press Finish.

7. You return to the Deployment screen. Press "Activate changes" (on the left), to release the lock from step 2.
8. Select analyticsRes (by marking the check-box on the left) and press the Start button (Servicing all requests) 

Now analyticsRes should be Active and Health OK.

9. Next you should be able to access the content of analiticsRes using the URL: http://host:port/analyticsRes 

in my case: http://bdahab-lap:9704/analyticsRes/

Well, that is not 100% correct. This specific URL will actually return:

Error 403--Forbidden

But if you put anything in that directory on the server, for example my son asked for the picture kirby.png, located at D:\or\MWHOME\instances\instance1\bifoundation\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\analyticsRes on my server (remember it from step 3?).

Now the following URL: http://bdahab-lap:9704/analyticsRes/kirby.png works. 

What is even better, within OBIEE the URL /analyticsRes/kirby.png is suficient.

For example:

This Embedded content object in Dashboard:

 Results in this screen:

I'm not sure showing Kirby is a classical business case, but I'm sure we will see better in the near future.

If you are in 11.1.1.7.X,  there are some changes in default Style and skin that the above mentioned paper doesn't cover. You might like to have a look at hekatonkheires.blogspot (Custom style and skin in OBIEE 11.1.1.7)