Oracle Analytics and AI

OAS 2024 Better (and more seamless) integration of "Export to Excel in DV" functionality into OAS

I am creating this idea based on conclusion of SR 3-36369009661 : OAS 2024 "Export to Excel in DV" functionality not integrated into OAS product.
One of the new functionality included into OAS 2024 (which is "subject of interest" of our business users) is Export to Excel in DV for table/pivot table visualization (https://docs.oracle.com/en/middleware/bi/analytics-server/user-oas/export-formatted-data-visualization-excel.html).
But when reading the documentation, describing how to "make this feature work" in OAS (https://docs.oracle.com/en/middleware/bi/analytics-server/administer-oas/enable-users-export-excel.html) , we found out that this functionality relies on other sw components (NodeJs + its modules), which:

are not included into standard binaries/installation of OAS 2024 and needs to be installed/configured separately (as a kind of post installation/upgrade step)
documentation how to install/configure/operate those separate components is really not very clear and ambiguous (for example not clear, what installation steps need to be done under root and which under OS user, where OAS binaries are installed)
starting/stopping of those "components" is not included into main start/stop scripts for overall OAS instance (<<Domain Home>>/bitools/bin/start.sh and <<Domain Home>>/bitools/bin/stop.sh).

Those are really for us quite serious "gaps" , substantially making our lives harder in terms of operation/administration of our OAS environments.
On the other hand this functionality is requested by our business users.
I would guess, the reason for having this feature "loosely coupled" into OAS occurred when "transfering" this new feature from OAC to OAS - where OAC is constantly moving away in terms of architecture from OAS.
I would guess, that in OAC , Export to Excel feature is implemented (in Kubernetes architecture of OAC) - as Kubernetes pod/container, having all sw components build into this pod and exposing it's functionality to OAC stack. And this creates additional effort to "transfer" (and also seamlessly integrate) this feature into "monolithic" OAS architecture.
But anyway, for us, OAS customers ,for being able to effectively manage/run this (currently) "loosely coupled" functionality, it would be very desirable to have more seamless inclusion/integration of "DV Export to Excel" functionality into OAS product:
a) Incusion sw components (NodeJS + required modules) into standard OAS 2024 (OA platform) installation (binaries).
b) Inclusion of start/stop of this "NodeJs Export to Excel" application (bi/modules/oracle.bi.tech/obitech-serverside-exportexcel-bundle.js) into standard start/stop OAS scripts.

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Comments

Gabby Rubin-Oracle

Michal, as always, we appreciate your feedback, and your assumptions are fairly correct (I believe the topic also came up in one of your past threads prior to OAS 2024).

While we try to keep OAC and OAS as functionally close as possible, we find ourselves in various situations where features almost need to be developed twice to avoid a functional gap between them. This is the case for the Excel export and the Workbook distribution capability. Even when we decide to redevelop architectural pieces of a feature, it sometimes means a significant gap in delivery (e.g. Semantic Modeler). This had led in the past to the perception that we were not committed to OAS, which was not the intent or strategy.

We decided to see if alternative configurations might be part of the solution and chose Export to Excel as the "test subject." It is not a perfect situation, but we hope that feedback on improving the deployment and administration experience will allow us to improve this method and accelerate the delivery of features to OAS. The reason that we started with Excel export and not email delivery is that the latter is a far more complicated feature to deploy. As often happens, the choices are imperfect; either we deliver the much-needed feature with a more involved installer/admin experience or not provide the feature in OAS 2024.

We will review your comments/suggestions in detail and see how we can improve. Merging into the main binaries is always preferred. Still, we feel the need to supplement that with additional methods and tools to allow us to meet our OAS delivery commitment (annual update) with the maximum scope of capabilities that were introduced to OAC during that year and not create a growing functional gap between the two. Continuous feedback on how we can improve the experience of this type of delivery is appreciated.

Michal Zima

@Gabby Rubin-Oracle Gabby, thanks very much for your comprehensive answer.
I would see "better" integration of this feature as kind of two step procedure :

Improvement of documentation of current implementation - this would be really very helpfull to be able to successfully install/configure/execute this functionality in current mode
In future release possibly integrating this into product itself (as described in my original entry).

If this would be possible, it would be good.
Thanks
Michal

Narayanan Ramachandran

Our customers need the exact same thing of exporting to Excel from DV in OAS 2024. However the implementation of this using external site is a lot of hassle to say the least. We have had to open firewall from our internal app server to the Nodejs site to access the public registry. Our cyber security teams are concerned about opening firewall to external sites. The documentation to even get this working is incomplete with a lot of missing pieces. Why cannot Oracle simply integrate all this into the OAS product?

Michal Zima

@Narayanan Ramachandran This is exactly our situation - we have very secured internal server environment and installing NodeJs modules directly from nmp internet repositories is no go option . Besides this one of the required NodeJs modules (puppeteer) is requiring installation of Chromium, since it relies on its libraries. So plenty of dependencies all requiring direct installation from internet resources.

Narayanan Ramachandran

Our customers need the exact same thing of exporting to Excel from DV in OAS 2024. However the implementation of this using external site is a lot of hassle to say the least. We have had to open firewall from our internal app server to the Nodejs site to access the public registry. Our cyber security teams are concerned about opening firewall to external sites. The documentation to even get this working is incomplete with a lot of missing pieces. Why can't Oracle simply integrate all this into the OAS product?

Narayanan Ramachandran

What is worse is when I opened a support ticket with Oracle and Oracle support says NPM is out of scope of Oracle support then why put out such a support document to export to Excel? Such needless waste of time.

Pedro Albuquerque

The export to excel of a table / pivot in a workbook canvas option is a "deal breaker" in the adoption of DV for the Financial Team of the company - when exploring the GL and other datasets, for instance; The .CSV export is not an option because it requires lots of technical transformations. When can we have this extremely useful functionality available in OAS?

Gabby Rubin-Oracle

@Narayanan Ramachandran Can you DM me the SR number? I agree that support should be able to help when you are trying to follow the documentation and run into issues.

@Pedro Albuquerque The capability exists, and the discussion revolves around the complexity and challenges of deploying the elements required to enable it on an OAS instance.

Narayanan Ramachandran

Gabby Rubin, my SR number is 3-37287038421. Thanks!

thorpw

Hi everyone,

Looking for some guidance here.

We currently have an SR open with Oracle and have been told there is no solution if you’re running on Red Hat Linux — that it only works on Oracle Linux 8 and above. Can this really be the case? Like many of you, we’ve found the export option to be a less-than-ideal solution, but we went ahead with it and only then discovered the restriction around the Linux version.

What’s confusing is that we’ve got the Node.js process up and running as expected, but the export button still doesn’t appear in the front end.

I had assumed we were at least in the “might work, but unsupported” category, but Oracle Support are insisting it simply won’t work at all.

Has anyone run into this or found a workaround? Any help would be hugely appreciated.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/middleware/bi/analytics-server/administer-oas/enable-users-export-excel.html#GUID-8C6CC804-DE44-47BA-A30A-59EFA22C3D58