FlexDeploy - Oracle Business Intelligence Plugin Guide

Owned by Joel Wenzel
Last updated: Jan 15, 2022 by Erick Jones

The Oracle Business Intelligence plugin provides operations to manage the Web Catalog objects and RPD repository files within Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)  or Oracle Analytics Server (OAS).

Supported Versions

  • 11.1.1+ on Linux
  • 12c on Linux

Key Features

  • Supports both OBIEE and Oracle Analytics Server (OAS)
  • Source RPD and WebCatalog from SCM or Development environment.
  • Supports FlexDeploy Full as well as Partial Deployments for WebCatalog objects.
    • Partial deployment option allows users to select various objects (aka Package) for deployment. Change detection and reporting is done for each individual object.
  • Property replacement via configuration files for RPD and Datamodel.
  • Operations to support synching WebCatalog objects to a source code repository.

@Since 5.5.0.1

This plugin supports two models of management for Web Catalog objects, derived by the selected project type.

Oracle BI

This project type is equivalent to the pre-5.5.0.1 model, and was previously name Oracle Business Intelligence.  The web catalog project files are populated into various object types, making it easier to filter by those types.

Oracle BI 2.0

This project type is new for 5.5.0.1 and matches the model introduced by the Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) support in 5.5.0.0.  The web catalog project files are populated into a single object type, called WebCatalog, making it easier to locate a set of files matching a file path or naming convention.  To identify the type of each file, the object name is artificially decorated with an extension matching the OBIEE object type.  For example, /shared/Sample Lite.Folder or /shared/Sample Lite/DailyReview.Report.

Both models are supported, with the only caveat being that you cannot change the project type of an existing project once the project files have been populated. Instead, you must create a new project.  While nothing will prevent you from changing the type on the project you will encounter unexpected behavior, and this is not a supported function.   

Plugin Operations 

Partial Deployments

Oracle BI plugin supports full as well as partial deployment projects. Partial deployment project can be created of Oracle BI type to manage object types defined in next section. RPD deployment is only supported as full deployment project, which should be a separate project.

  • Project can either source WebCatalog files from development environment (Oracle BI server) or SCM (any supported SCM type).
  • Select SCM Type as None, if you want to perform development environment to other environments migration. Keep in mind that artifacts are still captured at build time in FlexDeploy repository to allow for reproducible deployments.
  • Folder deployment in partial deployment mode, only deploys Folder without any of it's children objects. You can select individual children objects as necessary in package for deployment.
  • Objects in files list can not be sequenced for this project type. If necessary, user can control sequencing when building package.
  • If necessary you can move objects from one type to other.
  • See Source Control for the RPD and WebCatalog Objects for more details on how you can source files from SCM.

Supported Object Types

Supported WebCatalog objects types for Oracle BI (Oracle Business intelleigence for pre-5.5.0.1) project type include:

  1. Folder
  2. Analysis
  3. Dashboard
  4. Dashboard Prompt
  5. DataModel
  6. Filter
  7. KPI
  8. Metadata
  9. Report
  10. Style Template
  11. Other

@Since 5.5.0.1

All files for the Oracle BI 2.0 project type are categorized into a single type:

  1. WebCatalog

Special Considerations

The following macros are not currently supported in the footer:
  • style