Replacing the Home page within OBIEE with a more friendly “Welcome to
the BI System” is becoming a more popular thing to do - many of our clients now
have this:
Replacing:
With something like this:
As well as being the first page the users see when they login, we also
change the ‘Home’ link in the dashboard menu bar to point to this page as well,
so the users can quickly return to it at any time.
The standard method of changing the login page for users is to use the
PORTALPATH repository variable, but with some recent patches there have been
problems with this so we’ve come up with an alternative method using an HTML
redirect within the home page itself.
Changing the Home link is a common task and there are other blogs around
which show how to do this, but I’ve included it below as well.
Changing the login
page
Our new method of doing this is to use standard HTML code and embed a
redirect within the home page. This home page still exists, but the redirect
just prevents the users from seeing it.
To do this you need to edit the bieehome.htm file.
There are two possible locations for this. The main location is under:
<obiee_home>/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/web/msgdb/pages/bieehome
However you may have already copied this to the OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent
directories if you’ve made other customisations:
<obiee_home>/obiee/instances/instance1/bifoundation/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1/msgdb/pages/bieehome
Take a backup copy of the file bieehome.htm then edit it.
Search for the line:
<body class="HTMLBody">
and beneath it add the following 8 lines, replacing the URL with
the appropriate URL for your welcome page
- copy from the browser address bar and replace everything to the left
of /analytics with two dots (..)
<p align="center"> </p>
<script type="text/javascript">
Redirect();
function Redirect()
{
location.href = '../analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&PortalPath=%2Fshared%2FWelcome%2F_portal%2FWelcome to BI';
}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Redirect();
function Redirect()
{
location.href = '../analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&PortalPath=%2Fshared%2FWelcome%2F_portal%2FWelcome to BI';
}
</script>
save the file.
This will come into effect after OBIEE is restarted, which we’ll do
later.
Change the 'Home'
link
Now we need to change the Home link in the dashboard menu bar:
For this we need to edit a javascript file, header.js
This can be found in the directory:
<obiee_home>/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/bi_server1/tmp/_WL_user/analytics_11.1.1/7dezjl/war/res/b_Mozilla
Take a backup copy of it first then edit it. You need to be careful now, this script in
this file is quite complex and the syntax needs to be perfect for it to work.
The code is also all on one line, so it’s not that easy to see where you are.
Search for the string:
saw.header.NavBar.prototype.onHome=function(b,a){saw.header.openURL(saw.commandToURL("bieehome"),a)};
Now replace the code between the curly brackets:
saw.header.openURL(saw.commandToURL("bieehome"),a)
With this below, again replacing the URL with the correct one for your
welcome page, but in this case only from saw.dll onwards:
window.location.href="saw.dll?dashboard&PortalPath=%2Fshared%2FWelcome%2F_portal%2FWelcome
to BI"
Save the file.
Restart OBIEE
Perform a restart of the OBIEE services - either from the Enterprise
Manager console or a full restart using your normal process.
Now when you login your welcome page will be displayed by default and
the Home link will always return to it.
This is of course just the default login page. It can still be
overridden by users who choose alternative starting page in their preferences
or who access OBIEE via a URL which includes a specific portalpath reference.
For the record, this blog was written using OBIEE version 11.1.1.7.140415
(Build 140403.1046 64-bit).
