TIP #1:Export BI Catalog captions from command line in OBIEE 11g

Localization is the most important and useful feature in OBIEE which will help to use the OBI Application across several countries in their own language.

The Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation layer supports multiple language translations for any presentation column name and column description. When working with Oracle BI Answers or rendering a dashboard, users should see their local language strings in their reports. For example, English-speaking and French-speaking users would see their local language strings in their reports.

There are two kinds of application strings required for the translation in Oracle Business Intelligence.

One we need to externalize the captions from RPD perspective and other from BI Catalog perspective.

In BI Catalog Perspective the Presentation Services objects are end-user created objects such as Reports, Dashboards, and Pages. Translations for Presentation Services strings are stored in the captions.xml file. How this could be accessed can be found from Oracle BI Presentation Service Admin Guide.

We all know how to do this from catalog manager. The same we can do from command line in OBIEE 11g we can export catalog captions for localization/Translating your BI catalog. One major advantage of this command is we can achieve same from LINUX/UNIX environments without opening catalog Manager Utility.

The steps to achieve this are as follows:

1. Open command prompt and navigate to <MW_HOME>instances\instance1\bifoundation\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\
   coreapplication_obips1\catalogmanager\
2. Execute the following command to export captions as per the below syntax:

Syntax for localization command:

runcat.cmd/runcat.sh -cmd localize -outputDirectory <output directory>

[-excludeDesc] [-incremental] [-duplicates (leaveAlone | removeIds | removeTexts)]

[-folder <path{:path}>] [-skipFolder <path{:path}>]

( (-offline <path of catalog>) | (-online <OBIPS url> -credentials <credentials properties file>) )

Basic Arguments

-outputDirectory <output directory>     Where to put the to-be-translated caption files.

Optional Arguments

-excludeDesc Don’t bother localizing descriptions

-incremental Only write changes to the output files

-duplicates (leaveAlone | removeIds | removeTexts) What to do with duplicate messages

-folder <path{:path}> Which folders in the catalog to localize

-skipFolder <path{:path}> Which ones not to

Common Arguments

-offline <path of catalog>

-online <OBIPS url>

-credentials <credentials properties file>

Example

1. To generate localization tags for everything in the catalog:

In Windows:

<command_prompt>: runcat.cmd -cmd localize -offline c:\oraclebi\data\web\catalog\paint -outputDirectory c:\temp\localized

In UNIX/LINUX:

<command_prompt>: ./runcat.sh -cmd localize -offline c:\oraclebi\data\web\catalog\paint -outputDirectory c:\temp\localized

2. To generate localization tags for only new or changed item names from the catalog folder /shared/Sales:

In Windows:

<Command_prompt>: runcat.cmd -cmd localize -offline c:\oraclebi\data\web\catalog\paint -outputDirectory c:\temp\localized -folder /shared/Sales -excludeDesc –incremental

In UNIX/LINUX:

<Command_prompt>: ./runcat.sh -cmd localize -offline c:\oraclebi\data\web\catalog\paint -outputDirectory c:\temp\localized -folder /shared/Sales -excludeDesc –incremental

Note: incremental changes will require merging by hand into existing translation files.

Thanks,
Shiva.