1. Setting Up Your Project

Exercise Objectives

To define an Oracle JDeveloper workspace, project, and BI Designer framework.

Exercise Description

This exercise introduces you to the wizards that create the basic JDeveloper containers. These containers, are needed to build an Oracle Business Intelligence Beans application. Most important is the BI Designer object, which is the container for business intelligence objects. The BI Designer lets you construct, organize, and manage OLAP data connections and objects.

Exercise Tasks

Create the JDeveloper Workspace and Project

Workspaces keep track of the projects and environment settings that you use while developing your application. Projects are containers for the source files that are used to create applications and applets. Follow these steps to create a new JDeveloper workspace and project:

  1. From the File menu, choose New.
  2. In the New dialog box, under Categories, select General; under Items, select Workspace. Choose OK.
  3. In the New Workspace dialog box, accept the default workspace directory name and specify BIWorkspace.jws for the workspace file name. Ensure that the Add a New Empty Project box is checked. Choose OK.
  4. In the New Project dialog box, accept the defaults and choose OK.

Notice that the JDeveloper System-Navigator has been updated to display your new workspace and project. To view the default project settings, right-click the project label Project1.jpr and choose Project Settings. You will now create the framework for adding business intelligence objects.

Create a new BI Designer

The BI Designer is used to aid in the visual development of your business intelligence objects. It contains references to the information that is required for connecting to Oracle9i OLAP and to the BI Beans Catalog. To create a BI Designer, you use a wizard that prompts you for the following information:

To create a new BI Designer, follow these steps:
  1. In the JDeveloper System-Navigator pane, select Project1.jpr.
  2. From the File menu, choose New.
  3. In the New dialog box, under Category, select Business Intelligence and, under Item, select Designer. Choose OK. The BI Designer Wizard appears.
  4. In the Welcome page, choose Next.
  5. Accept the default name for your BI Designer and choose Next.
  6. Select your Oracle9i OLAP data source. If this is your first time connecting through JDeveloper, then you must set up the OLAP data source using the following procedure:

  7. In the BI Designer Wizard, choose Next to continue.
  8. Accept the default directory that defines the root folder where your business intelligence object definitions (for example, crosstab and graph definitions) will be saved. Choose Next. If the wizard prompts you to create the specified directory, then choose Yes.
  9. Review the summary and choose Finish to complete the BI Designer Wizard.
  10. From the File menu, choose Save All to save your work.

Notice that the JDeveloper System-Navigator has been updated to display the newly created BI Designer object, a BI Configuration file (Project1BIConfign.xml), and other *.DAD files. The BI Designer object holds the settings for your design environment; the BI Configuration file holds the settings for your runtime environment. Initially, these settings are identical. The *.DAD files contain OLAP and Catalog connection settings. DAD stands for Database Access Descriptor.

To change the settings for either the BI Designer or the BI Configuration file, right-click the BI Designer object or the BI Configuration file, and choose Settings. The resulting BI Beans Settings dialog box contains the following tabs:

To test the OLAP connection that will be used during design, select the Design Settings tab and choose Test. To test the OLAP connection that will be used at runtime (if it is different from the design settings), select the Run Settings tab and choose Test.

Exercise Summary

This section looked at the basic steps that are required to create a workspace, project, and BI Designer. These objects act as containers for Java source files and for the BI components that are used in the development of your application. The next section shows you how to build business intelligence calculations (for example, variances, time series calculations, and so on) using the CalcBuilder wizard.

Overview | 2. Creating Calculations