Analytics Software

We are trying to setup a dashboard to show data from some webservice. The webservice returns data in xml format which does not meet the requirements of the obiee xml gateway component. So we created a cgi app that preprocesses the xml file returned by the webservice before import it into the physical model obiee. The cgi app looks like this http://someserver/test.cgi.

The cgi app returns the data in a html page which contains serveral xml islands (<XML id="123">...</XML>). The Admin Tool is able to import the physical layer schema from it and create one table for each xml island found in the result. It appears to me that we don't have control over the names of the table generated and they are default to the name of the cgi page plus some index number, in this case, the tables names are "test_0", "test_1", etc. Any change to the table name will cause the presentation layer widget to report errors like "couldn't find table <sometablename> in http://someserver/test.cgi loaded".

We can settle with default table name generated. But we need to be able to pass some parameters to the cgi app to generated data dynamically which obiee seems to have problem. Whenever we use a url like "http://someserver/test.cgi?target=data" to import the schema (the data returned by this url is exactly the same as the previous url without the target param), the Admin Tool will report something like "Some objects are not imported because of Invalid names".

I saw from the obiee documentation that the xml gateway adapter supports dynamic xml/html generated from a url which can have parameters containing even session or repository variables. But I even couldn't get it to work with a constant parameter. Can someone tell me what I have been doing wrong? Or pointing me to some examples that take dynamically generated xml data as data source?

BTW, we have obiee server running on a linux rehl5 server and we use the admin tool from a windows machine to manage all the metadata.

Thanks.