Understanding the Datamodel configuration file

The datamodel configuration file consists of information to replace the datasources of all datamodels within an OBIEE WebCatalog. An example snippet of a file is below

The Red text above is the property type. In this case, it will always be 'datasourceref' as to indicate the datasource reference of the datamodel should be replaced.

The Green text above is the datamodel name as it appears in the WebCatalog. Only use the datamodel name, do not put the xdm extension on the line.

The Purple text above is the value to be replaced as the datasource reference on deployment.

Using FlexDeploy properties in the configuration file

FlexDeploy properties can also be used in the configuration file as data source values. An example is seen below.

Above, you can see the property used in the configuration file. Below, you can see the property defined on the FlexDeploy workflow used for deploying WebCatalog objects.

And lastly, you can see it configured below on the environment instance. For more information on using FlexDeploy workflow properties, see Defining Workflow Properties.

Using an OBIEE configuration file in a workflow

In order for the deploy plugin operation to make use of a configuration file, the build operation must first export the config file from some form of source control management system. In the example below, we are going to bring in a config file from an SVN repository, during our build workflow. This property file will then be available in the deploy workflow. The properties are replaced during the deploy, so properties can be replaced with different value in each environment where the RPD or webcatalog are deployed.

After performing the build with the above workflow and project configuration, we should see our config file in our artifacts repository in FlexDeploy.

Note that because we did not specify a checkout folder in the project configuration or a target subfolder in the SaveArtifacts workflow step the config file is checked out directly under the FD_TEMP_DIR with no parent folder. The saveArtifacts operation picks it up from there by default.

Due to the fact there is no parent folder, we only need to specify the config file name to the deploy workflow. Had we set a checkout folder or target subfolder, we would need to put the parent folder in the deploy workflow input, such as %PARENTFOLDER%/Datamodel.properties