Registering Pluggable Drivers

There are three kinds of pluggable drivers that an application can provide: authentication, connection, and user community drivers.

BI Beans ships with default implementations for pluggable drivers. The default implementations for connection drivers and for a user community driver are already registered and turned on. If you are satisfied with these default implementations, then you do not have to register any pluggable drivers.

You have the option of using custom pluggable drivers. If you register even one pluggable driver, then you must register all pluggable drivers, including the default drivers that are provided by BI Beans. The following list shows, in order of precedence, the ways that you can register pluggable drivers:

Information to provide in the configuration file

Configuration settings are specific to each application, so each application must have its own BI Beans configuration file. The configuration information is stored as XML data in a file named with the xml extension.

Applications that use the default connection drivers must also have their own set of DAD files, as specified in the configuration file. The BISession object reads the configuration file upon startup.

To specify a pluggable driver in the configuration file, provide the following information:

Example: Configuration information for a pluggable driver

The following code shows sample pluggable driver settings in the <BISession> section of a configuration file.


<BISession> <BIUser Username="pmartinez"/> <PluggableDriver DriverType="a" InvocationLevel="olap" Required="true" DriverClass="oracle.dss.appmodule.server.DSSApplicationModuleAuthenticationDriver"/> <PluggableDriver DriverType="c" InvocationLevel="bicatalog" Required="true" DriverClass="oracle.dss.persistence.storagemanager.bi.mapping.ReposConnectionDriver"/> <PluggableDriver DriverType="c" InvocationLevel="olap" Required="true" DriverClass="oracle.dss.connection.server.drivers.mdm.MDMPluggableConnectionDriverImpl"/> <PluggableDriver DriverType="u" InvocationLevel="session" Required="true" DriverClass="oracle.dss.persistence.storagemanager.bi.mapping.ReposUserCommunity"/> </BISession>

Specifying configuration information with BISession

You can use the following methods of the BISession object to override the pluggable driver settings in the configuration file:

Consolidating driver implementation

You can choose to consolidate the implementation of the AuthenticationProvider, ConnectionProvider, and UserCommunityProvider interfaces into a single class where appropriate. You can customize the pluggable drivers as appropriate for the needs of your application.