Wednesday 20 November 2013

Ease up your SoaSuite deployment using global Tokens in composites

Yesterday a project-colleague pointed me to a cool new feature in SOASuite Patch set 6 (11.1.1.7).
Everyone who has done deployments of SOASuite throughout different stages within a Dev., Test, Acc. & Prod. lifecycle knows the throubles that end-pointreferences causes. One improvement in SOASuite 11g was the introduction of configuration plans. However those are not only environment specific, but also composite related. So for every composite you need one for every stage in the lifecycle.
In my release/deployment framework I solved this to have just a default generated configuration plan per composite, with development values. That one I 'subversioned' along with the composite.
Then in the (ant based) release proces I adapted the configuration plan for each composite, replacing each server reference with an ant-property. Then during the deploy I have conf plan copied to one that is specific for the target environment, replacing the properties based on a environment properties file.
Now in Patch Set 6, Oracle took that a level further. Now you can place those properties yourself in the composite on the references. There you replace the specific endpoints with those properties. In the EnterpriseManager you can bulk import the property values for the specific development-cycle stage using a "mdm-url-resolver.xml" xml file. But you can also enter or edit specific values one by one in the Enterprise Manager. For Ant users, the tokens have the same markup as Ant-properties.
This removes the need of configuration plans. Also it might be easier to clone for example a production environment to do for example a deployment test of  a new release.
Read all about it in the Oracle® Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

BTW.: this feature is mentioned to me by Tony van Esch, who wrote a little more elaborate blog on this himself.

Friday 8 November 2013

Integrate BI-Publisher with OEM12c

Regularly I create VM's for courses as a 'Virtual Course Environment'. Earlier I did an install of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. But now there was a request for an integrated BI Publisher install.

Having an OEM12c install, the integration with BI Publisher with OEM12c is pretty straightforward. The install guide for this integration can be found here. This guide is part of the OEM12c 12.1.0.1 version, and for that version Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g version 11.1.1.5. is required.

My OEM12c install is of version 12.1.0.2.0, so one patch set newer. Apparently the current OEM12c release is 12.1.0.3 (as of november '13).

The 11.1.1.6 release of BI-Publisher can be downloaded here. I initially installed the current 11.1.1.7 release that I downloaded here. However, when I ran the configureBIP script, from {OEM12c Home}/oms/bin, I got the following error:
[oracle@darlin-vce-db bin]$ ./configureBIP
Error: This script requires that BI EE Version "11.1.1.6.0" be installed, but "11.1.1.7.0" has been installed
So it's important to note that OEM12c install is of version 12.1.0.2.0 expects Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g version 11.1.1.6.

By the way, the BI Publisher integration guide of OEM12c release 12.1.0.2.0  is found here. And 'surprisingly' it indeed states that it expects BI-Publisher 11.1.1.6. So, I could have known...