BusinessObjects Administration – Session Management

Hi Readers,

In this blog we are going to see one of the common Issues in Business Objects deployment i.e. Stale sessions which catch up the concurrent user licenses. Let’s have a look on the issue briefly.

Problem statement:

Concurrent users are being shown as logged in multiple times and their sessions are not being cleared even when they are not using the Business Objects Applications. As a result concurrent user licenses are getting used up very quickly causing other concurrent users facing login Issues due to unavailability of concurrent user licenses (i.e.) All the concurrent licenses are utilized.

Impact – What are the effects/symptoms of the issue?

Concurrent Users of the system will be facing logon Issues due to unavailability of the concurrent licenses.

Benefits

• Effective utilization of existing Business Objects Licensing
• Useful for re-sizing of Business Objects deployment.

Solution Approach for resolution

1. Always ensure that Session Cleanup Listener and Logon token parameters are configured properly in respective business objects applications.

Open web.xml under <BO Installdir>\Business Objects\Tomcat55\webapps\InfoViewApp\WEB-INF

And make sure that the below configuration has been made (in BO 3.x).

• Session Cleanup Listener is active/ uncommented.

-          This will ensure the automatic session cleanup is enabled

• Logon token is set to disabled.

-          Changing the true to false does not allow the token to re-login from stale session.

The above is for Infoview application. If you want to implement the same for other 3-tier applications like CMC, Xcelcius and AdminTools, you have to modify the web.xml for each application directory within Business Objects Installation directory.

2. Implement a SDK utility which periodically monitors and cleans up the stale sessions which consumes the concurrent user license.

Hope the blog could be useful for User and Session management for Business Objects Administrators.

Thanks for reading.  

Read More About  Business Objects Administration

BusinessObjects Administration – Repository Diagnostic Tool

Hello Booglers,

Repository Diagnostic Tool (RDT) is going to be the topic of discussion today. It is always possible in every business objects deployment to have inconsistencies between CMS database and File Repository Servers. This may occur during events such as Backup restoration, disaster recovery or network outage. CMS system database may be interrupted during these events and causes inconsistencies with objects in the CMS database.

Repository Diagnostic Tool (RDT) comes into picture here. It scans the CMS system database and identifies inconsistencies in infoobjects, diagnoses and repairs them.  Types of inconsistencies are

• Object to file inconsistencies

Inconsistency between info objects in CMS database and the corresponding file in FRS

• Infoobjects metadata inconsistencies

Inconsistency in metadata of an infoobjects in CMS database.

Running RDT Tool

You can find the RDT tool here:

In WINDOWS:

The executable is “reposcan.exe” and is available in

“<INSTALLDIR>\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86\”

In UNIX:

The Shell script is “boe_reposcan.sh” and is in “<INSTALLDIR>/bobje/”

Sample RDT Usage Pattern (Windows):

We need to execute the below in Command prompt from the reposcan.exe’s installation directory. The below sample is for CMS database in SQL SERVER.

reposcan.exe

-dbdriver sqlserverdatabasesubsystem

-connect “UID=XXX;PWD= XXX;DSN=XXX”

-repair true

-inputfrsdir “E:\Program Files (x86)\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\FileStore\Input”

-outputfrsdir “E:\Program Files (x86)\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\FileStore\Output”

-outputdir “E:\Program Files (x86)\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\reposcan”

-scanfrs true

-scancms true

-repair false

XXX has to be replaced with your DSN credentials.

Viewing Repository Diagnostic Tool’s result set

The output files would be generated at the below directory by default:  <BOE install>\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\reposcan. You can change the default location with a different directory using -outputdir option in reposcan execution usage pattern.

The output files generated would be

• The name format of scan output file is Repo_Scan_YYYY_MM_DD_HH_MM_SS.xml
• The name format of repair output file is Repo_Repair_YYYY_MM_DD_HH_MM_SS.xml

Scan Summary report

Repair report

Based on the reports we can proceed further with remedial action.

Hope this blog is interesting.

Thanks for reading.  Read More About  Business Objects Administration

Business Objects Administration – Security Rights migration from SAP BO 3.x and BI 4.x

Hi Readers,

In this blog we are going to see the security rights migration from SAP BO 3.x and BI 4.x and the challenges we could encounter while doing BO content migration from 3.x to 4.x.

This post describes security settings as they correspond to the new interface and functions. The structure of the interface has been redesigned and security settings changed in certain cases. This means that some 3.x security settings are not directly compatible with the new interface. Where equivalents exist, these are used.

This document will guide you in the changes you might need to make when migrating content from 3.x to 4.x. Certain rights have been renamed, others are unaffected, and some rights are not supported in 4.x, and will require unsetting before resaving and migrating those reports.

Below are some of the known general Issues.

• Rights are not supported in 4.x and exist in 3.x
• Rights that are renamed in 4.x and exist in 3.x

Let us see each case in detail.

• Rights are not supported in 4.x

The typical example for this category would be Desktop intelligence application and redesign of      BI launch pad interface.

• Desktop intelligence

As Desktop Intelligence is removed in 4.x all the corresponding rights are not supported.

• Interface

In 3.x we are allowed to hide the toolbar based on the user rights. But in case of 4.x it is replaced by toolboxes in which we can disable the individual component.

Some of the rights come under this category:

Right	Migration status
Enable drill mode	No longer maintained in 4.x
Extend scope of analysis	No longer maintained in 4.x
Interactive: General – Ability to hide / show toolbars	Toolbar is replaced with toolbox
Enable HTML Report Panel	HTML viewer is removed in 4.x
Desktop Intelligence Application level rights	Desktop Intelligence Application is removed

How to resolve this?

We need to remove these rights in 3.x before migration so that they will not be migrated to the new version.

• Rights that are renamed in 4.x

The right “View SQL“in 3.x has been renamed to “Query Script – Enable Viewing” in 4.x.

Similarly below are some of the rights that belong to this category in my knowledge.

Rights in 3.x	Rights in 4.x
Create document	Documents – enable creation
Data Tracking: Enable for users	Data – enable data tracking
Data Tracking: Enable format display changes by users	Data – enable formatting of changed data
Edit SQL	Query script – enable editing (SQL , MDX…)
Enable Auto save for this user	Documents – enable auto save
Enable formula and variable creation	Reporting – create formulas and variables
Enable Java Report Panel	Interfaces – enable Rich Internet Application
Enable Publish and Manage Document Content for this user (did not exist)	Documents – enable publish and manage content as web service
Merge dimensions for synchronization	Reporting – enable merged dimensions
View SQL	Query script – enable viewing (SQL , MDX…)
Web Intelligence Rich Client : Save a document locally on the file system	Desktop interface – save documents locally
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Allow local data providers	Desktop Interface – enable local data providers
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Export a document	Desktop interface – export documents
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Import a document	Desktop interface – import documents
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Install from Info View	Desktop interface – install from BI launch pad
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Print a document	Desktop interface – print documents
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Remove document security	Desktop interface – remove document security
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Save a document for all users	Desktop interface – save document for all users
Web Intelligence Rich Client: Send by mail	Desktop interface – send by mail

How to overcome this?

We need to remap these rights in 4.x after migration by comparing them against 3.x rights.

• Special cases

The below rights are added in XI3 SP4 and are not included till 4.0.3.

i.    Import from BI On Demand

ii.   Export to BI On Demand

Resolution

SAP recommends not to migrate to XI 3.4 or later to BI 4.0.3.x or a previous release as some of the rights that are added in these versions are not replicated in till BI 4.0.3.x.

Hope the post was useful for those considering 4.x migration.

Thanks for reading.  Read More About  Business Objects Administration