How to convert prompted link to bookmark link?

Question

Hello guys,

The general request is to call a Dashboard via APEX using GoURL technique and using some filtering on APEX interface. If we know the Dashboard's prompted link then we could replace some strings in it (based on APEX filtering) and call OBIEE using IFrame. Unfortunately the link itself is visible via "View Page Source" and the end user potentially could replace some filters with others. Is it possible once we know a specific prompted link to receive its bookmark link analog? Or ... at least to hide completely the link from APEX to OBIEE?

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,

Todor

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Hi Todor,

Actually I was thinking it was maybe you (you are the only Todor I ever met till now  ).

Actually I'm just thinking about "exotic" workarounds but can't really find anything obvious. I'm kind of sure there isn't a webservice call for that kind of translating prompted link to bookmark link. So the only thing I can imagine is really you doing it by script in the background and catch the new URL. But you can't do that "live" as it takes time, so it's an asynchronous call. If you have a limited and known set of values you can code something in that way but ... is it really worth it? Not sure ...

For the name on here there are few places where it must be changed and I remember it took me some time to end up with the right one, keep trying

Wish all the best too and maybe see you at the next BGOUG (got the call for paper email this morning).

Todor · Answer

Hi Gianni,

Actually you confirmed what I already had found, just wanted to be sure there is no other way

We met at last BGOUG, Pravetz, hope you remember it

For some reasons I'm not able to update my name here from 2684930 to Todor.

Wish you all the best,

Todor

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Hi,

I would say that to convert a prompted link to a bookmark link you have to open the page with the prompted link and click on the icon to get the bookmark link and save the resulting URL.

In a prompted link URL you have all the parameters in the URL, in the bookmarked link you have a "BookmarkState" attribute which, alone or combined with "PageIdentifier", identify a saved state somewhere on the web catalog. It probably act in a similar way as when you save a customization actually (never looked into it in detail but the behaviour is similar).

So not something you can do outside of OBIEE.

And to hide the URL in a iframe .... well ... it's web, to hide the URL you must not load the page. Even if you encode the URL in hexa ascii characters (the browser will understand the link) with just a right click on the page and looking at the properties you have the link of the iframe, that's how web works !

You can of course request the page content with a piece of java or any other server side code (even javascript can do it actually) and then output the content directly, you only need to make sure all the links (href, css, js, img etc.) have a full link to works fine.

All in all I wouldn't get my hands into something like that.

If you want to prevent people from getting the link and changing the parameters in the URL you are trying to substitute yourself to the OBIEE security.

Security in OBIEE exists: set it up correctly and people can try to change all the parameters they want data don't come back on the screen because OBIEE tell them they aren't allowed to see them.