It's been a while...

It's been a bit quiet lately. Not because of lack of interest, on the contrary. I've been very busy. From a BI perspective, lots of things have changed. I focused more on the back-end side of things (database, ODI etc) and also had some time with other vendor's tools. Let's leave it at that... :-) But first and foremost: I've been playing around with Oracle TRC. Translational Research Center. It's a platform based on Oracle Software (Database, Weblogic, ODI and OBI) that supports researchers and doctors in diagnosing patients. It offers the possibility of combining clinical data with genomic data. Which is of course very useful and necessary when you want to aim for personalized treatments. There is nothing more personal than an individual's DNA. Version 3.0 is out, so I'm figuring out what has changed. In the coming weeks, I'll be installing and configuring TRC at a customer's site and post progress here ! Regards, René

store non-OBIEE objects in the catalog

Thanks to John Minkjan (obiee101.blogspot.com) I was able to disclose (and secure) non-OBIEE content on a dashboard.

Using the regular Upload functionality you can easily upload a (for instance) PDF file into the Shared Folders of the webcatalog.

The awkward thing is, that if you put a link on your dashboard and use the Browse button to navigate to the particular folder, you don't see the PDF file since it is not an OBIEE object.

A workaround for this is to create a (dummy) analysis and store it in the same folder as the PDF. Then, as described above, put a link on your dashboard and navigate to the dummy analysis. As a final step, (since you now have the path to the folder where the PDF resides) replace the name of the OBIEE analysis with the PDF's name.
There you go ! Now you can have a link on your dashboard to non-OBIEE objects and use your security model on it !

Kind regards,
René