Enable OBIEE location-alias with Action Navigate to a Web Page

Shane Goodwin

Organization Name

Gibson, Cohu, many others

Description

Cloud OBIEE - OTBI - requires hard coding the URL for Action Navigate to a Web Page.  This means that when we create a report with deep links to Objects in Cloud SAAS, the URL for the POD is hardcoded.  When moving reports from DEV to TEST or PROD, or when cloning Prod to Test, ALL reports with Deep Links must be updated.

OBIEE on premise has a feature where the administrator can modify ActionFrameworkConfig.xml to add Aliasing using a simple XML format.  Once Aliasing is available, the Action Navigate to a Web Page can use a format to reference the Alias using the construct @[aliasname].

http://@[webservicehost]/MyWebService/myservice.wsdl

 

<location-alias>
     <alias>webservicehost</alias>
     <actual>myserver.mycompany.com:7001/MyWebService/</actual>
</location-alias>

Use Case and Business Need

• Implement a method to abstract the current environment Cloud SAAS URL for use with Action Navigate to a Web Page
• Implement a generic method to refer to any Web Location without hard coding in each report

 

Business need is to manage Actions when promoting of reports between environments or when cloning Environments.  Currently excessive manual work is required to update each hardcoded URL.

More details

There are many options to resolve some or all of this issue.  

The simplest for Deep Links to SAAS appears to to be to simply provide a SELF type reference out of the box.  This means we could always rely on something like @[SELF] to refer to the current POD.  

To solve the whole problem, make the file ActionFrameworkConfig.xml available for editing in the Administrator UI.

Note this may be considered a duplicate to https://cloudcustomerconnect.oracle.com/posts/903fd0d6bc.  

This request applies to OTBI / OBIEE Analyses created from Subject Areas.  

Original Idea Number: c94a4d1fb9

Jbgood

Creating and sending an email containing a dynamically generated deep link requires the POD server to be part of the URL. Currently this needs to be hardcoded.

Shane Goodwin

Oracle - please review and provide feedback or at least acknowledge this as a request.

Karthik Chedella

This will be a very useful feature and foolproof when moving reports from one environment to another.

Shane Goodwin

Oracle - please review and provide feedback or at least acknowledge this as a request. Managing deep links in Analyses is extremely difficult with OTBI when managing multiple environments.

Marcus131975

This is very much needed as the maintenance required following clones is significant and unnecessary

Chris Pfeifer

Oracle, it's very disappointing that you still have not addressed this unreasonable hard-coding burden on your customers after all these years. Please allow the location-alias addition for SaaS customers as you've allowed it for on-premises.

Stevo V

I second this, and up vote it, time to get it done. Thank you.

Chris Pfeifer

Hi All,

UPDATE: Based on this Idea Lab ER, I recently submitted an SR to request an alias to be added to our ActionFrameworkConfig.xml file in all PODs, as well as a Business Impact Statement to justify it.

The SR Support Engineer brought it to the attention Noelle Bartlam, the OTBI Product Manager. Noelle has thankfully submitted a high-priority internal ER with Development.

Fingers crossed! :)

====================

Bug 35411931 : PROVIDE SELF-SERVICE LOCATION ALIAS FOR SEAMLESS MIGATION OF CONTENT BETWEEN ENVS

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/BugDisplay?id=35411931

Type E - Enhancement

Severity 1 - Extremely desirable feature

Status 15 - Enhancement Req. Internal (Oracle) Review

Created May 19, 2023

Updated May 19, 2023

Shailesh Kumar

Cool we also need this feature for our clients

Matt Paine

Great idea. Very annoying to substitute this value post clone across multiple reports.