Art of BI: Turn your OBIEE Sample App VM into a Development Environment

During client engagements, you are sometimes faced with Clients having an In-house development team, who also have access to the Test environment you are developing your deliverables and solution for. In this situation, and also as best practice, you should always have your own development environment where you can test your implementation and Proof of Concepts on before the client development team has access to it.

Our development team has initially installed the Sample App v511 for OBIEE 12C on their windows machines in order to implement all Proof of Concepts, including OBIEE 12C new features, to fulfill our client requirements.

After the VM is setup one of the first things to do is to create a shared folder between your local machine and VM.

Steps to create a Shared Folder:

1. From the main menu bar select Devices > Shared Folders > Shared Folder Settings
2. In the SampleApp511p – Settings dialog box, Click the folder with a green plus on the right to add a new shared folder
3. Enter the folder Path on your local machine and the folder name
4. Check the boxes Auto-mount and Make Permanent as shown below
   Auto-mount is checked to ensure the folder is mounted immediately onto the VM, and Make Permanent ensures that the folder is constantly mounted even after reboot.
5. Verify that you can access the folder from your VM by navigating to the following path: Places > Computer > Filesystem > Media 

Steps to setup ODBC connections:

1. On your VM, log into Enterprise manager to Identify the port used by the application [Note: Make sure the BI Database and BI Services have been started]
2. Note the port used by AdminServer and bi_server1
3. Navigate to biinstance and select the Availability tab
4. Expand the BI Servers process and note the port number for obis1
5. Now navigate to Machine > Settings > Network
6. Click on the Port Forwarding button
7. Click the Add new Port Forwarding Rule for 7792
8. Click the Add new Port Forwarding Rule for 7001
9. Click the Add new Port Forwarding Rule for 7780 and enter the Guest IP 10.0.2.15 OR no IP address at so that it is empty/blank
   Note: You can bring out the value for Guest IP using the command /sbin/ifconfig in the VM terminal from the inet address.
10. Click OK twice to exit the Port forwarding and Machine settings
11. Now on your local machine, open up the ODBC Data Source Administrator
12. Go to the System DSN tab and click Add to add a new data source connection
13. Select the OBIEE 12C driver and click Finish
14. Enter the name for the ODBC connection and set Server to local and click next
15. Enter the login ID and Password and the Port number 7792 [obis1 port], and check the Save login ID and Connect checkboxes, and click Next
16. If the next page is returned with no errors and you can see the databases, that means you are now connected successfully.
17. Click Finish and OK to close the data source administrator

Steps to upload the development RPD:

1. Place the saved RPD onto the VMShare shared folder on your local C drive
2. In your VM Open up a terminal and navigate to the following path:
   cd app/oracle/biee/user_projects/domains/bi/bitools/bin
3. Then enter the following command to upload the RPD you placed in the shared folder
   ./data-model-cmd.sh uploadrpd -I /media/sf_VMShare/OBIEE_12c_tst_20160614.rpd -SI ssi -U weblogic -P Admin123
4. In the same folder path, stop the OBI services using the command: ./stop.sh
5. Start OBI Services using the command: ./start.sh
6. From your local machine log into BI Administration tool online, selecting the VM ODBC connection we created earlier, and enter the Username and Password.
7. Verify that the RPD shown is your development RPD and not the Original SampleApp RPD.

Steps to loading the development Web Catalog:

1. Place the saved (archived) Catalog onto the VMShare shared folder on your local C drive
2. Log into the Analytics portal
3. Click on Catalog in the global header
4. Select the Shared Folders under Folders
5. Click the Unarchive link under Tasks
6. Browse and select the catalog you wish to unarchive from the VMShare folder
7. Click OK

Steps to log into Catalog Manager:

1. From your local machine select the Catalog Manager application
2. Select File > Open Catalog
3. Enter the URL as: http://localhost:7780/analytics/saw.dll
4. And fill in the user name and password and click OK
5. You should be able to log in successfully and view the Catalog objects you just unarchived.

 
And Finally, you are ready!