Analytics Software

Hi everyone,

So as most people know, the iPhone has a cool app that allows you to login and look at your OBIEE content. In theory it's really cool, but as it turns out, a lot of the cool graphs default to Flash and Flash is not supported by the iPhone.

Using a flag in the instance config file, its possible to default all graphs to png's instead of Flash. But that causes all the interactive drillability to go away since it's just a flat picture.

It seems that an elegant solution to this issue would be to have two presentation services running; one that defaults to Flash and one that defaults to png's. Then let the OC4J container determine if the device accessing the website is a mobile device or a full client browser. Mobile devices get routed to the png's and non-mobile devices go to the standard Flash page.

Although not supported by Oracle, it is possible to setup multiple presentation services on the same server. In fact, RNM has a great blog about how to accomplish this (http://rnm1978.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/multiple-rpds-on-one-server-part-1-the-bi-server/).

I was able to setup two presentation services (AnalyticsWeb and AnalyticsMobile) and point them at the same catalog folder. That way you don't have to duplicate you're work.

The one thing I couldn't figure out how to do was to point them at the same RPD file. Ideally, we would have one rpd file with the master metadata definitions, and both presentation services would drive from that single RPD. However, the BI Server throws and error of the same RPD appears twice in the NQSConfig.ini file. I also created a shortcut to the master RPD, but upon startup, the BI Servers said that it was not a valid repository file.

Worst case scenario, I could just use copy & paste to duplicate the single repository. And then each time I updated one, I would just need to delete the other and re-copy. But that seems a little tedious and I was hoping for a more elegant solution.

Does anyone know how I could get the NQSConfig.ini to let me point to the same RPD twice? Is there some kind of symbolic link or image I could create?

If it helps, I'm working with OBIEE 10.1.3.4 on a Windows Server 2003 environment with the OC4J standalone container.

Thanks for the help!

-Joe