BI - Upload Limitation

I have recently been designated the BI technical resource on my project so am looking at the BI capabilities (on 7.8) for the first time. Despite a fairly complicated and mistake laden patch upgrade which I do not even want to get into, it is a pretty powerful tool, much better architected than Actuate. Anyway, there are also some pretty glaring limitations as well on how it is administered that require so little effort to fix, I decided to just go ahead and fix them.

My main beef is that the architecture requires your BI report developer to have access to both the BI file system and the Siebel Server file system. I suppose you could set this up in a way that minimizes security risk, but it just seems so unnecessary. Essentially, to upload a new BI Report Template, the developer creates a record in the BI Report Template administration view, attaches the two template files (an RTF and an XLF) and clicks the upload button. So far, so good. The problem is that these template files must also exist in a specific place in the Siebel Server file system as well to generate a report. But the code behind that button does not take the extra step to just copy the files to where they need to go. Also, there is an existing product defect where modifications to an existing report record require the developer to go into the BI File system and delete the entire directory containing that report template. So that is where I step in.

First I added two new System Parameters indicating the locations of the BI and Siebel home directories. There is a way to grab environment variables through script but I did not feel like investigating this so let's call that phase II. For example, here are my two:

Name	Value
BIHomeDirectory	E:\OraHome
SiebelHomeDirectory	E:\sea78\siebsrvr

Then, we need to trap the call to upload the templates file. This call is performed from 'Report Template BC' by the 'Upload' method. We need to always delete the directory before this upload is called. We also want to delete the existing template file from the Siebel server file system. Here is a script to place in the PreInvoke method to accomplish that (there are also some references to the Log and Frame objects):

switch (MethodName) {
  case "Upload":
    try {
      Log.StartStack("Business Component", this.Name()
        +".PreInvoke", MethodName, 1);
      this.WriteRecord();
      var sReturn, sCommand;
      var sSiebel = Frame.GetSysPref("SiebelHomeDirectory")
        +"\\XMLP\\TEMPLATES";
      var sPath = Frame.GetSysPref("BIHomeDirectory");
      var sFile = this.GetFieldValue("ReportTmplFileName")
        +"."+this.GetFieldValue("ReportTmplFileExt");

      sPath = sPath
        +"\\XMLP\\XMLP\\Reports\\SiebelCRMReports\\"
        +this.GetFieldValue("Report Name");
      Log.stepVars("BI Report Path", sPath, 3);

      sCommand = 'rmdir "'+sPath+'" /S /Q';
      sReturn = Clib.system(sCommand);
      Log.stepVars("Command",sCommand,"Success?",sReturn,3);

      sCommand = 'del "'+sSiebel+'\\'+sFile+'"';
      sReturn = Clib.system(sCommand);
      Log.stepVars("Command",sCommand,"Success?",sReturn,3);
    } catch(e) {
      Log.RaiseError(e);
    } finally {
      Log.Unstack("", 1);
    }
    break;
}
return (ContinueOperation);

Ok. That addresses the product defect for updates. Now the second part is to copy these template files to the Siebel server file system once the template files are uploaded. The following script can be added to the InvokeMethod event:

switch (MethodName) {
  case "Upload":
    try {
      Log.StartStack("Business Component", this.Name()
        +".Invoke", MethodName, 1);
      var sReturn, sCommand;
    
      var sSiebel = Frame.GetSysPref("SiebelHomeDirectory")+
        "\\XMLP\\TEMPLATES";
      var sPath = Frame.GetSysPref("BIHomeDirectory");
      var sFile = this.GetFieldValue("ReportTmplFileName")
        +"."+this.GetFieldValue("ReportTmplFileExt");

      sPath = sPath
        +"\\XMLP\\XMLP\\Reports\\SiebelCRMReports\\"
        +this.GetFieldValue("Report Name");
      Log.stepVars("Source Path",sPath,"Target Path", 
        sSiebel,"File to copy",sFile, 3);
      sCommand = 'copy "'+sPath+'\\'+sFile+'" "'+sSiebel
        +'\\'+sFile+'"';
      sReturn = Clib.system(sCommand); 
      Log.stepVars("Command",sCommand,"Success?",sReturn,3);
    } catch(e) {
      Log.RaiseError(e);
    } finally {
      Log.Unstack("", 1);
    }
    break;
}

And there you go.