OBIEE Agent - Trying to send different dashboard content to each recipient

Hibai_

Hi everybody,

I’m trying to schedule OBIEE analytics dashboard (one prompt, many analyses) with OBIEE agents. What I need is basically to send the corresponding dashboard to each office. I have those offices in the prompt mentioned, so I would need to somehow relate the prompt values to the “Recipients” section of the agent.

The closest trial I have found is the one explained in these three articles:

http://obinsight.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/case-study-emailing-obiee-dashboards.html

http://obinsight.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/case-study-emailing-obiee-dashboards_23.html

http://obinsight.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/case-study-emailing-obiee-dashboards_24.html

But unfortunately I’m unable to use it for my case. I would need to relate OBIEE users (which is a problem in itself, as we have lots of offices to send dashboards, but would still work as workaround) to offices, so that each office of the prompt would be related to the corresponding OBIEE user. And then include those OBIEE users as recipients. That’s something the example above is supposed to be doing, but I didn’t success to simulate in my problem.

Any idea about how to solve this issue? I know OBIEE Publisher schedules are supposed to be easier, but due to the complexity of the content, we had to do the analyses and a dashboard.

Thanks in advance and regards,

Hibai.

Gianni Ceresa

Hi,

How to relate users to offices is something only you can answer, as it's strictly related on your business.

The idea is to set a session variable for each user defining the office(s) he can see, and then you use that variable to filter the dashboard.

Hibai_

Hi Gianni,

Thanks for your response. I think I’ve tried more or less what you suggest, but I’ll research more deeply.

Anyway, what I meant with “relate user to the corresponding office” was that I need a way to map OBIEE users to a database column. I think it should be regardless to the business.

In my case each user would be related to one office, which means that if I specified them in recipients section (User_A, User_B, User_C), the scheduler would send one (and different each other) dashboard to each user (Dashboard_A with content related to office "A", Dashboard_B with content related to office "B", Dashboard_C with content related to office "C").

Thanks and regards,

Hibai.

Gianni Ceresa

Well, in general things are the other way round: users come from the company LDAP and so they also already have a "business" link with the office.

If you don't have that then you need a table with just "username", "office" and then you session variable will select "office" where "username" is equal the login of the user.

On the agent side you need to change it to make it run as "recipient" and not with a fixed user, in that way OBIEE will execute the agent acting as each individual recipient and will get, at each execution, the right value for "office".

Hibai_

Ok Gianni, thank you very much again. That’s almost exactly what I was trying to do, so I’ll have to check it out again, as it seems I’m doing something wrong somewhere.

By the way, when you say in your last paragraph “at each execution”, do you mean that I should run the agent once per user? Hopefully not, as what I’m expecting is to execute the agent once and generating n dashboards, one per each user – instead of n executions of the agent. I’m a bit confused at this point.

Thanks and regards,

Hibai.

Gianni Ceresa

You don't have to do anything, the "at each execution" is OBIEE doing the job.

Looking at this screenshot you see the 2 possible values for "Run As".

If you agent is "Specified user" it means OBIEE execute the dashboard page only once as the specified user and then will send the result it got to all the recipients.

If your agent is set as "Recipient" it means OBIEE will execute the dashboard page as each one of the recipients, and at each execution send the result to the respective recipient.

That's how the same dashboard page can send different content to different people, just like your users when they use the page will see different values based on their office.

But the agent is still only one, it's OBIEE which is going to be smart enough to know it needs to load the dashboard page once for each recipient so it can apply the recipient "environment" (session variable which are related to the user and different for a user from another one).

Hibai_

Hi Gianni,

Finally I have my issue solved . Actually it was a matter of permissions what was producing the problems, which means that the links I attached in my first post work perfectly for this scenario. Of course, your advices encouraged me to reanalyze what I had previously done and to finally find the source of the problem, so thank you very much for your support.

Regards,

Hibai.

SHAMISA

can you please explain session variable  and how it is working to identify each office for specific users

Gianni Ceresa

Do not resurrect 6 years old threads.

Start a new thread and ask your question providing the relevant information (product, version etc.).

As for session variables, a good place is to start in the doc.