OBIEE Authentication Using the Oracle E-Business Suite

There are two primary options for sharing authentication solutions with the Oracle E-Business Suite. The Oracle E-Business Suite and OBIEE both can take advantage of Oracle’s Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions. If SSO is used, both OBIEE and the E-Business Suite would be subscribing applications.

The other option is for OBIEE to use the Oracle E-Business Suite for authentication. This solution requires that users first log into the E-Business Suite and from there exercise (click-on) a menu function to bring them into OBIEE without having to type a user name or password.

OBIEE and Oracle E-Business Suite Integration

Configuring OBIEE to use the Oracle E-Business Suite for authentication is straight forward and can be completed in a test environment with only a small amount of effort.  It is technically accomplished through the sharing of the E-Business Suite session cookie.

Further documentation on the specific steps to configure OBIEE to use the E-Business Suite for authentication can be found on Metalink as well as in the OBIEE documentation.  A high level summary is as follows:

  1. Using the BI Admin client tool, modify the RPD file to add a connection to the E-Business Suite database.
  2. Add an initialization block to the RPD file that calls the E-Business Suite API APP_SESSION.validate_icx_session and then call FND_GLOBAL to collect the variables resp_id, resp_appl_id, security_group_id, resp_name, user_id, employee_id and user_name.
  3. Edit the OBIEE configuration files authenicationschema.xml and instanceconfig.xml
  4. Create a menu function to launch OBIEE. You must use the SSWA OracleOasis.jsp$mode=OBIEE
  5. Populate the system profile option ‘FND: Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE base URL’ with the url for OBIEE. For example: http://theobieeserver.yourcompany.com:9704
  6. Upload the modified RPD file using Enterprise Manager and bounce all OBIEE services

Technical Summary

Authentication integration between OBIEE and the E-Business Suite is through a combination of a shared session cookie and a dynamic URL. The key to making it work are edits to OBIEE’s instanceconfig.xml configuration file. It is in this file that OBIEE instructed is to look for the E-Business Suite session cookie.

 

If you have questions, please contact us at info@integrigy.com

 -Michael Miller, CISSP-ISSMP

References

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