Very quick post! I noticed recently that the new Siebel Reports Guide (Revision E) has an extensive ‘Troubleshooting’ section. This contains a large number of common errors and issues along with details for investigating and resolving them.

Well worth a look if you, like many others, are having problems with the Siebel and BI Publisher integration in Siebel 8.1.x.x

You can find the relevant chapter here.

It’s great that Oracle are taking developers concerns seriously and are really making an effort now to tighten up the integration with BI Publisher. I had a chat recently with the Product Manager and he outlined really quite extensive and positive plans for the future. I’m certainly hopeful for 8.2.2 and 8.1.1.7 that the underlying issues will be resolved and we can re-focus our efforts on developing really great Siebel implementations.

I’m still in upgrade mode and have recently been revisiting Actuate to BIP migration in an 8.1.1.5 environment. Much to my annoyance, but not great surprise, 8.1.1.5 has introduced further headaches (in addition to a smattering of improvements) to the whole Siebel and BIP integration process.

First up, 8.1.1.5 introduces some SIF and seed data files for you to import. Prepare yourself for some creative thinking as you try to work out what the Release Note author meant to write and not what he or she wrote – the documentation is appalling. Notably:

1. The SIF file referenced doesn’t exist. You’ll have to locate a ZIP file, extract it then hunt around for a similarly named file to import into Tools
2. The ‘commands’ given to import the seed data are completely wrong. You’ll need to refer to MOS for correct instructions on importing the seed data
3. Application view records have been missed from the seed data files. Reports Guide revision D has instructions for their manual creation while revision E sees the instructions vanish into thin air
4. When you do get round to assigning the views to responsibilities, be prepared for misspelled view names – hey, it’s only a computer program, who needs accuracy?

Finally, those who used Doc ID 823360.1 to implement functionality to generate reports through Workflow may find it no longer works after upgrading to 8.1.1.5. It would appear that some bodge has been introduced that breaks the ‘Bookmark’ argument to the XMLP Driver Service BS. Spooling the SQL shows Siebel creating a temporary PDQ, executing it then deleting it, in order to retrieve the data for the report request. I can’t quite believe this but I have the SQL spool to prove it. You’ll need to replace all of your Bookmark arguments with hefty PDQ friendly expressions.

You may get the impression that I’m not very happy with this latest release and you’d be right. The Siebel and BIP integration has been so hastily thrown together that it’s us, as developers and customers, who have to wade through lines of debug output and SQL and come up with workarounds to these irritations.

Let us know of your experiences with 8.1.1.5 or BIP integration in general.

With a running BIP Publisher server and tested integration, we can start looking at migrating Actuate reports to the BIP Publisher format.

Some key facts to recall from previous posts:

1. Actuate uses COM to talk to Siebel. This means Report objects in Tools, .ROL files and ssiebel.bas
2. BIP uses Web Services. This mean Integration Objects, SOAP messages and XML
3. Actuate uses it’s own .ROD file format to store report definitions, designed in the Actuate eReport Designer application
4. BIP uses a simple .RTF file format to represent reports designed in Microsoft Word, using the BI Publisher Desktop plug in

You are probably thinking at this point – Report Migration Tool. It’s true that Oracle have made available a migration tool through My Oracle Support (Patch ID 8968224). The tool will attempt to create IOs from your Report objects and .RTF files from your .ROD / .BAS files. In practice, I’ve found it to be buggy and the results less than satisfactory. The remainder of this post assumes you’ll want to re-do your reports manually but please feel free to give the tool a try and see if it works for you.

The steps for report migration involve migrating the data structure from Report objects to Integration Objects then migrating the report design from Actuate (ROD) to BIP (RTF). Let’s start with the data feed. Roughly, this translates to the following steps:

1. Locate the Report object and note the underlying BC and fields
2. In the corresponding View Report object, note the underlying BO. I realise that there can be more than one view associated with one report, and we’ll cover that scenario below.
3. Create an Integration Object, using the Tools wizard, mapping from the BO, BC and fields of the Report object.
4. If you want to use a Primary MVF, select the top level object in the wizard. If you want a repeating group across an MVL, select the child object in the wizard
5. Check in and deploy to the server via Tools (Deploy to Runtime Database)
6. Navigate to Site Map > Administration – BIP Reports > Sample Data File Generation and generate sample XML for your IOs

It’s essentially that simple: BIP will use this IO to pull data out of the object layer using EAI via a Web Service call.

Migrating the report design itself is a less straight forward process but still not overly complex. Here are the steps that I would suggest:

1. Open your Actuate report design in eReport Designer. Not only can you view the report layout, you can drill down into the Data Stream to pick out any modifications in the fetch or layout code
2. Open Word, go to Add Ins and check that the Oracle BI Publisher toolbar is visible
3. Select the Data > Load XML Data menu to load the sample XML file that you generated previously
4. Replicate your layout and design in the Word document
5. Use the Insert > Field menu to add your field label placeholders into the report document
6. Use the Repeating Group and Table Wizard menu items to create repeating groups for parent, child and grandchild relationships
7. Use the BIP Publisher User Guide, installed in the Start Menu, to translate your Actuate code to BIP code
8. Use Preview to see how the report looks and tweak appropriately
9. When you are happy, use the Tools > Translate Template > Extract Text menu item to generate the .XLF file that Siebel requires
10. Upload to Siebel via Report Template Registration, assign to a view via View Association and you’re done!

Clearly, I’ve vastly over simplified the steps to migrate any custom code and layout in your Actuate Reports. However, BIP has a powerful language construct that can be embedded in your documents to provide any custom functionality that you might have. Check the BIP user guide for more information.

Please feel free to post if there are specific steps that are troubling you or any particular functionality that you are trying to migrate across that is causing you grief.

Following on from our previous discussion around installing and setting up BIP, I thought I’d drop in a quick article to talk briefly about additional Siebel server and application configuration. We’ll start off with some useful information:

As you know, Actuate Reports were defined in Tools and associated directly with Views within the Repository: Report and View Report object types should be familiar. Tools generated a Report Library (ROL) file which would be incorporated into the Report Design (ROD) to feed data into the report. The View definition, along with the Report object definition, then allowed a user to select and run a report. Unsurprisingly, things are different in Siebel 8.1!

First of all, the only work done in Tools is to specify Integration Objects. That’s it. When it comes to deploying reports, things are a lot easier than before! Take a look at the Administration – BIP Reports screen: here you’ll find where to create new Report definitions (think Report objects in 7) and associate them to Views (thing View Report objects in 7). There are also views which allow you to generate sample data to assist with developing reports and a view to purge completed report items. The ‘Views’ view is self explanatory and is a lot nicer than the old Tools mechanism: associate the Report here and users will immediately see it in the ‘Reports’ icon menu.

An important view in this screen is the Report Template Registration screen. Once you have the server up and running, as per the previous post, this is where you’ll need to come to progress further.

Much like Actuate, BIP hold report designs independently of Siebel. In the case of BIP, RTF files represent the report designs. Having got everything else working, you must now populate the BIP repository with the standard Siebel Report Designs. From within this view, highlight the reports to upload and click the ‘Upload Files’ button. Log in to the BIP Portal and have a look under Shared Folders > SiebelCRMReports: you should see the report objects appearing here as they are uploaded from Siebel.

You should now be able to run vanilla reports from the Thin Client in Siebel 8.1: navigate to an appropriate view, click the ‘Reports’ icon and you’ll see available reports under the ——- BI Publisher Reports ——- header.

Common problems at this point again seem to relate to the Web Service definitions and configuration and the BIP Security Model config. See the previous post for a link to an article on MOS that covers these off. Also remember that the ‘XMLPReportServerxxx_xxxxxx’ log file is your friend!

As ever, please feel free to post about any issues you have or have resolved.

Next time, I’m going to look into report design within BIP and how to upload and execute custom reports.