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Here in my Blog, I am trying to explain the concepts which would be helpful to you when
working on BI projects in development environment, and make the Objects ready to deploy
on Production. And these concepts are merging of metadata & web catalogs built during the
project development. Here I am using 2 repositories. One is the default Paint Repository and
the other is the Usage Tracking repository that is bundled along with BI EE. Our aim is to get
the contents of the Usage Tracking Repository into the Paint repository.In first part I will
explain how to merge two repositories and later will see how to merge two catalogs.
About:
One of the features of OBI EE is that one can merge repositories. So if you have 2
repositories each having its own set then you can use the Merge option to merge both of
them into a single repository. Before going ahead, lets try to understand 3 important
terms that would be used while merging.
Current Repository - This is the repository that you would be merging the changes into.
This is the repository that would be open while merging.
Original Repository - This is the repository which is the pivot for Merge. This is just a
dummy repository.
Modified Repository - This is the repository whose objects you would like to copy to the
Current Repository.
Purpose:
What merging would do is, it would merge the difference of the repository objects that you
would find between Original and the Current Repository and also the Original and the
Modified Repository. Let’s try to understand this with a simple example. In our example, we
will be using 2 repositories. One is the default Paint Repository and the other is the Usage
Tracking repository that is bundled along with BI EE. Our aim is to get the contents of the
Usage Tracking Repository into the Paint repository. Let’s look at the contents of both the
repositories. Paint.rpd would be located under {OracleBI}/Server/Repository and the Usage
Tracking.rpd would be located under {OracleBI}/Server/Samples/ usagetracking
Figure 1: Paint.rpd
Click on Merge, you would get a dialog box asking you to choose the Original Repository. In
our case, we would have to choose a dummy repository (copy the paint repository to create a
new one and then include that here). Enter the password for the dummy repository and click
ok. As soon as you enter that you would get a message like the one below that the
repositories are identical.
Now in second part will see how to merge Two web catalogs:
About:
It’s recommended to use this approach only if you are completely aware of the Web Catalogs
that you are merging. Merging of web catalogs is not the same as merging of repositories
since there will be a lot of overlapping objects in any 2 web catalogs. So, it’s better to
understand the implications of trying this.
Purpose:
The most common method of combining 2 different web catalogs is to copy over the
dashboards, reports, prompts, filters etc over from one catalog to another. This is the
recommended way of copying over catalog objects from one Web Catalog to another. If you
are moving from a development to a test instance then all you would have to do is to copy
over the web catalog folders from one machine to the other. But if you have a lot of
reports/dashboards in 2 different instances of BI EE and if you are looking for an automated
way of merging them, then read ahead. The concept of merging 2 web catalogs can be
summarized by the picture shown below.
3. Open the Paint Web Catalog in the offline mode using the Catalog Manager.
When you do this, this will give you an error saying that shared folder does not exist in the
blank folder. Just ignore it since the tool expects the web catalog to be in a proper format.
Note:
As always ensure that your security setup is proper. The above said option is primarily used
for upgrades. But since it uses the concept of the 3-way merge, this can also be used for
merging 2 web catalogs. The only drawback is that you would have to thoroughly check for
the completeness of the merge. Most of the times you would be better of copying the web
catalog objects from one catalog to another. But this should give you another approach of
merging if at all you are looking for an automated option.
-Vaishnavi Mali.
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