Is there a version control feature in Oracle BI Answers for a single Analysis?

Question

I built an Analysis that displayed Results, error free. All is well.

Then, I added some filters to existing criteria sets. I also copied an existing criteria set, pasted it, and modified it's filters. When I try to display results, I see a View Display Error.

I’d like to revert back to that earlier functional version of the analyses, hopefully without manually undoing the all of filter & criteria changes I made since then.

If you’ve seen a feature like this, I’d like to hear about it!

Answer 1

Micah-

Great question. There are many times in the past when we wished we had some simple SCM on the Oracle BI Web Catalog. There is currently no "out of the box" source control for the web catalog, but some simple work-arounds do exist.

If you have access server side where the web catalog lives you can start with the following approach.

Oracle BI Web Catalog Version Control Using GIT Server Side with CRON Job:

1. Make a backup of your web catalog!
2. Create a GIT Repository in the web cat base directory where the root dir and root.atr file exist.
3. Initial commit eveything. ( git add -A; git commit -a -m "initial commit"; git push )
4. Setup a CRON job to run a script Hourly, Minutely, etc that will tell GIT to auto commit any adds/deletes/modifications to your GIT repository. ( git add -A; git commit -a -m "auto_commit_$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%T")"; git push )

Here are the issues with this approach:

• If the CRON runs hourly, and an Analysis changes 3 times in the hour you'll be missing some versions in there.
• No actual user submitted commit messages.
• Object details such as the Objects pretty "Name" (caption), Description (user populated on Save Dialog), ACLs, and object custom properties are stored in a binary file format. These files have the .atr extension. The good news though is that the actual object definition is stored in a plain text file in XML (Without the .atr).

Take this as a baseline, and build upon it. Here is how you could step it up!

• Use incron or other inotify based file monitoring such as ruby based guard. Using this approach you could commit nearly instantly anytime a user saves an object and the BI server updates the file system.
• Along with inotify, you could leverage the BI Soap API to retrieve the actual object details such as Description. This would allow you to create meaningfull commit messages. Or, parse the binary .atr file and pull the info out. Here are some good links to learn more about Web Cat ATR files: Link (Keep in mind this links are discussing OBI 10g. The binary format for 11G has changed slightly.)