Create MetaData in OBIEE

As you know there are very few tools that integrate metadata into the application deployment and always has to be integrated with an external system like create wiki links inside your application, create customized web pages etc etc…

Well, OBIEE, as I see, has been good in integrating a metadata generation, deployment tools and displaying the metadata and its almost seamless.. we LUV OOB functionality…. lets see how it can be implemented.

Lets open up your web catalog folder i.e. c:\OracleBi\web\res folder. Create a new folder called “metadata” inside this \res folder.

Stop all your OBIEE services.. You know the sequence on how to stop these services .. if not check this

Now, open your rpd in offline mode. Lets start using our famous free samplesales rpd using Administrator login..

Now, Click on Utilities as shown above. When a new window pops up, say “Generate metadata dictionary” and click “execute” button. When asked for a folder to where the dictionary has to be created, choose the folder we created above i.e. OracleBIData\web\res\metadata and click OK.

This creates a bunch of xml files in your destination folder and can be hosted on your obiee web server.  Also, a new folder with the same name as your rpd gets created. There are two main files to concentrate on. One being treeindex.xml and nameindex.xml file. These are your header pages to traverse across this generated dictionary… Can you add anything more to this? Ofcourse, these are merely pure xml files and any additional information you would like to add can be added to these pages. Use one of the free xml editors like XML Marker to edit these files. TreeIndex traverses using a hierarchy and gives you the respective layers of seperation where as NameIndex uses the alphabetical index to go through all the object names and their meta data descriptions.

Open your web browser and open the file treeindex.xml created inside c:\OracleBIData\web\res\metadata\samplesales folder. You can browse to NameIndex from top of the treeindex.xml file.

Now, startup your OBIEE services and you should be seeing something new next to your presentation layer tables and columns. There should be a green icon next to your table name and when you click on it, it brings up all the relevant metadata documentation you have collected.

Until next time.. kudos to all OBIEE evangelists