About OBIEE Business Areas

When you install an OBIEE Business Area for the first time the system generates an Oracle BI repository (.rpd) file—which is required for creating and displaying Subject Areas, Answers, and Dashboards in Oracle BI Presentation Services—and copies it to the BI Server. This generating .rpd allows the creation of visualizations of LSH data through OBIEE Answers without the use of the OBIEE Administration tool. Oracle LSH stores the .rpd file in the OBIEE Business Area Source Code definition.

The system deploys the .rpd files from all the OBIEE Business Areas that share the same OBIEE Service Location Name onto that Oracle BI Server and merges them into a single .rpd file as each Business Area is installed.

After the installation is complete, follow the steps in Deploying the Repository File to make the Business Area available to users.

Customizing the RPD File Using OBIEE Administration Tool: Oracle LSH takes advantage of only a small number of the features that OBIEE has to offer. If you are experienced with OBIEE you may wish to make changes to the Business Area's default .rpd file using the OBIEE Administration Tool and upload the resultant .rpd to replace the system-generated .rpd in the Business Area in Oracle LSH.

In order to ensure that subsequent installations of the Business Area do not overwrite those customizations, the system tracks the origin of the .rpd file. When Oracle LSH creates an .rpd file during installation, it populates the File Reference Name with the value SYSTEM. When a user uploads a customized .rpd file the system populates the File Reference Name with the value USER.

Each time you install the Business Area, the system checks if the current .rpd file was generated by the system or manually uploaded to the Business Area. If the file was generated by Oracle LSH and not manually uploaded and the Table Descriptor, Join, or Hierarchy definitions have changed, then the system generates a new .rpd file and stores this as a new version of that Source Code.

If the current .rpd file was uploaded, the system does not override it with a new file even if you have made changes in Oracle LSH. You must make corresponding changes—adding, deleting, or modifying tables, joins, and hierarchies—in the Administration Tool and reupload the file.