Installing the Oracle BI Mobile App Designer

The BI Mobile App Designer is the replacement for the BI Mobile App for Ipads that now lets you build your own BI reporting applications for any mobile device, phone or tablet, even browsers on pc’s.

This is a new feature available in OBIEE from version 11.1.1.7.1 onwards.  If you are only 11.1.1.6x or 11.1.1.7 then you must upgrade/patch to 11.1.1.7.1 before installing this. This blog takes you through the steps of installing & configuring it within OBIEE.

Prerequisite patch

Before it can be installed OBIEE 11.1.1.7.1 needs to be patched with patch number 17004920.

Download the appropriate patch file for your environment from Oracle Support – I’m using Windows 64bit, so I downloaded p17004920_111171_MSWIN-x86-64.zip.

Unzip this into a temporary directory.

Now stop all of the OBIEE services in the way you would normally do for your installation.

In this temporary directory create batch (or shell for linux) file called setpaths.bat (or setpaths.sh)  which we need to set the path and environment variables for the patch correctly. 

Into this file enter the following commands, replacing the <obiee_home> reference on the first line with the actual directory path:

set ORACLE_HOME=<obiee_home>\Oracle_BI1

set PATH=%ORACLE_HOME%\bin;%PATH%

set JAVA_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%\jdk

set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%PATH%

set PATH=%ORACLE_HOME%\OPatch;%PATH%

on Linux this commands should be:

ORACLE_HOME =<obiee_home>\/Oracle_BI1;export ORACLE_HOME

PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH;export PATH

JAVA_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME/jdk;export PATH

PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH;export PATH

PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/OPatch:$PATH;export PATH

On linux also run “chmod 777 setpaths.sh” to make the script executable.

Now open a command window (in windows open this as “run as administrator”), and cd to your temporary directory and run setpaths.bat (.sh)

Then cd into the 17004920 sub-directory and run ‘opatch apply’

If the verify passes, enter ‘y’ to continue with the patch. It should only take a few minutes.

Leave this window open, you’ll need it again in a mo.

Install Oracle BI Mobile App Designer

There are four steps to installing the Mobile App Designer:

1.      Apply the patch file

2.      Deploy the Mobile App Designer to Weblogic

3.      Setup the Security for the Mobile App Designer

4.      Setup the Apps library

Apply the Oracle BI Mobile App Designer patch

The Oracle BI Mobile App Designer upgrade is supplied as a patch file. So the first step is to apply this patch, in exactly the same way as the previous patch.

This time download patch number 17220944 from Oracle Support – this is platform independent, so the file you will download is p17220944_111170_Generic.zip. Unzip this into your temporary directory.

In the same command window as above cd into the new patch directory and run opatch again. If you closed the command window you will need to reopen it and run the setpaths.bat/sh script again.

There is no prompting on this patch, it just installs straight away.

Do not start weblogic or OBIEE just yet, but leave this window open.

Deploy the Mobile App Designer to Weblogic

Now the Mobile App Designer needs to deployed to the Weblogic web server. To do this run the Middleware Configuration Assistant. 

This started by running  <obiee_home>/Oracle_BI1/common/bin/config.cmd (.sh on Linux)  On Linux you’ll need a GUI/X11 emulator to run this.

Once past the splash screen, select ‘Extend an existing WebLogic domain:

Then select the domain to extend – it should default to the domains directory, so select the domain from under there.

Next check the option “Extend my domain using an existing extension template’, then use the browse button to locate the file <obiee_home>\Oracle_BI1\common\templates\applications\oracle.bimad_template_11.1.1.jar

On the JDBC Component Schema config screen leave the settings as they are and just click next

On the the JDBC Component Schema test screen we don’t want to perform any tests, so just click next again.

There are no Optional Configurations required, so just click next.

On the Configuration Summary screen click ‘Extend’ to begin.

The extension only takes a few seconds. Click Done to close the config wizard.

Enable the Mobile App Designer in Presentation Services


We need to add a new entry to the instanceconfig.xml file for presentation services to make the Mobile App Designer visible to the users.

Go to the directory <obiee_home>\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1

edit the file instanceconfig.xml.

Near the bottom of the file locate the </ServerInstance> tag and just before this insert the following lines:

<AdvancedReporting>
    <EnableMAD>true</EnableMAD>
</AdvancedReporting>

Save the file and close your editor.

Setup the Security for the Mobile App Designer

This step updates the system-jazn-data.xml file with the security permissions required for BI Mobile App Designer.

First we need to start WebLogic (but not the managed servers or OBIEE just yet).

From your command window Navigate to the <obiee_home>\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain\bin directory and run startWebLogic.cmd (.sh).

and wait for the 'started in RUNNING mode' message.

Once WebLogic is running you need to run a WLST script.  Open a new command window and change directory to the <obiee_home>\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\install directory

Now run the following command, substituting the <hostname> and <Weblogic administrator name> fields as appropriate:

<obiee_home>\Oracle_BI1\common\bin\wlst.cmd addMADCodeGrants.py t3://<hostname>:7001 <WebLogic administrator name>

Note it’s <obiee_home>\Oracle_BI1\common\bin\wlst.sh… on Lunix

You’ll be prompted to enter the password for the Weblogic Admin user, then the script will complete in a few seconds.

Now complete the start-up of OBIEE.  You can either stop the weblogic server above (stopweblogic.cmd/sh) and perform a full normal start-up of weblogic and OBIEE the way you normally do, or run the following to complete the start-up:

From your command window Navigate to the <obiee_home>\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain\bin directory and run startManagedWebLogic.cmd (.sh) with the BI Server name as the parameter:

startManagedWebLogic.cmd bi_server1

Wait for ‘started in RUNNING mode’ message:

Then minimise this window (do not close) and open a new command window and start the opmn:

Change directory to <obiee_home>\instances\instance1\bin   (change instance1 to your instance name if necessary)

And run opmnctl.bat startall  (or opmnctl.sh)

Setup the Apps Library

The Apps library is basically a folder in the catalog from where users can view, manage and subscribe to published apps.

With OBIEE fully started, open a browser and login using an administrator user, then go to the Catalog and select Shared Folders.

Use the new icon  in the menu bar and select Folder.

Enter a names for the Apps Library (it doesn’t have to be “Apps Library”!)

Under the new Apps Library folder, select More, then Permissions

At the moment you will not have any groups specifically aimed at BI Mobile users, so for now leave the permissions as they are:

Administrators can create content, BI Consumers can access it. As you build BI Mobile Apps you may grant specific permissions to individual users or create application/catalog groups to manage these user. You will need to come back to this screen to set the necessary permissions when you do.

Finally the folder you have created needs to be registered to act at the Apps Library.

Using a text editor, edit the xmlp-server-config.xml file in the directory:

<obiee_home>\user_projects\domains\<bifoundation_domain>\config\bipublisher\repository\Admin\Configuration

Substitute <bifoundation_domain> for your domain name.

Add a line for the APPS_LIBRARY_FOLDER_LOCAL property before the </xmlpConfig> tag.

Replace with value with the name you gave the directory above.

<property name="APPS_LIBRARY_FOLDER_LOCAL" value="/Apps Library"/>

Save the file.

Verify the installation

To verify the installation has worked, simply click on the OBIEE New dashboard link and see if ‘Mobile Application’ -> ‘Mobile App’ exists:

In a few seconds the Wizard should begin…choose type of mobile device…

Then the data source…

 

Save it in your Apps Library folder…

And start to Create…

Over to you…Enjoy!