BI Blog,  OBIEE

OBIEE 12c, managing repository

/

The Repository File (RPD) contains the data models, data source details, custom calculations, dimensional details and so on that bring the power to OBIEE’s reporting capability. Editing the RPD is still performed using the Administrator tool that is installed with the OBIEE Client tools:

admintool

Work with RPD in on-line and off-line mode

The Administrator tool lets you edit the data model in on-line or off-line mode:

  • In on-line mode all changes are immediately saved to the live RPD file and are available to users after a metadata refresh within OBIEE.
  • In off-line mode you can edit an RPD file downloaded from the OBIEE server. In this case the changes are not available in OBIEE until you re-upload the RPD file.Downloading & uploading the RPD file where OBIEE 12c is very different from 11g. In 11g you could simply FTP the current RPD file down from the server, edit it in the Administrator utility and then use the Enterprise Manager deployment screen to upload it, followed by a manual restart of the OBIEE components. Or if you preferred, stopped OBIEE, FTP’d the file back to the server and restarted OBIEE.In 12c you cannot simply FTP the current RPD down from the server and the enterprise manager no longer contains a deployment screen to put it back! So firstly, where is the RPD file? Many directories in the OBIEE installation have changed in 12c and the RPD now is located in:<obiee_home>/user_projects/domains/bi/bidata/service_instances/<SSI>/metadata/datamodel/customizations<SSI>  is the instance name of your OBIEE install. Unless you’ve changed it, it’ll probably be ‘ssi’. Look in the<obiee_home>/user_projects/domains/bi/bidata/service_instances directory to find it. If you look in this directory, you can find the files:
  • liverpd.rpd
  • liverpd.rpd_1
  • liverpd.rpd_2
  • liverpd.rpd.bak
  • ….
  • The liverpd.rpd is the file that was installed when OBIEE was installed and the liverpd.rpd_1 and liverpd.rpd_2 files are copied created following successive on-line edit sessions. So liverpd.rpd_2 is the current ‘live’ RPD file. OBIEE automatically copies and numbers the RPD files as you make on-line changes.You can simply copy latest RPD and open it in Administrator, but when you open the file it ask for a password. This password are not been mentioned in the installation process, so this is an internal password designed to stop anyone just copying the RPD and editing it.

    Download an RPD

    To download an RPD file for editing you need to use a new utility called data-model-cmd (probably data-model-cmd.cmd on windows) which is located in the <obiee_home>/user_projects/domains/bi/bitools/bin directory.

    There are a number of parameters you need for this command, the minimum of which are:

    downloadrpd     the instruction to download the RPD (as opposed to upload, see later)
-O rpdfilename  the name you want to give to the RPD file you’re downloading
-SI          the OBIEE service instance, e.g. ssi
-U           the weblogic administrator user-id
-P           the weblogic administrator password

    There are other parameters such as server name, port number etc, which you don’t need if running the command on the OBIEE server where the RPD file is located.

    So to download an online RPD in a file called obiee.rpd you can use:
    data-model-cmd.sh downloadrpd -U weblogic -P Password1 -O obiee.rpd -SI ssi
    We are now free to edit the RPD as we need.

     

    Upload an RPD

    To upload the RPD back into OBIEE you need to reverse the process for downloading above. You can use the same data-model-cmd.sh command but with slightly different parameters:

    uploadrpd       the instruction to upload the RPD.
-I rpdfilename  the name you want to give to the RPD file you’re uploading
-SI          the OBIEE service instance, e.g. ssi
-U           the weblogic administrator user-id
-P           the weblogic administrator password

    So you run the following command:

    >data-model-cmd.sh uploadrpd -U weblogic -P Password1 -I obiee.rpd -SI ssi –W Password1

    where –P is the weblogic user’s password and W is the password that you assigno to the offline “obiee.rpd” repository.

    In the OBIEE 12c changing the online rpd doesn’t perform a restart of the OBIEE components, its way faster than the old enterprise manager restart, so presumably it’s performing a server metadata refresh instead.

Leave a Reply