One of the questions I always get asked during my BI seminars is how you migrate OBIEE requests and dashboards from one Web Catalog to another. The context of this is usually that you’re putting your project into production, or test or whatever, you’ve migrated the RPD file (or parts of it using repository exports and imports), now you want to migrate across the reports and dashboards.
The easiest way of migrating across Web Catalog objects is to use the Catalog Manager application that comes with OBIEE 10.1.3.2 and higher. You’ll be using the copy and paste feature of the tool to copy across the items, so first of all start up Catalog Manager and connect to the Web Catalog that has the objects you wish to migrate. Locate the first of the objects (or a folder, if there’s a whole set of requests to migrate), and select Copy from the application toolbar.
Then, either close this catalog and open one you want to copy to, or start another copy of Catalog Manager, and paste the objects into the other catalog.
Make sure you don’t close down all of the Catalog Manager applications before pasting the objects into the other catalog, as the objects will be lost from the clipboard – they’re only present whilst at least one copy of Catalog Manager is open.
As an alternative to the GUI, you can copy individual requests, dashboards or whole folders using filesystem copies. [Note, however, this warning from Kurt Wolff, who notes that copying the webcat files using anything other than the supported means risks introducing corruptions that may not be obvious straightaway.] If you locate the catalog you wish to copy from in your filesystem – for me, it’s at C:\product\OracleBIData\web\catalog\paint\, you can copy whole folders across to your other catalog, or individual requests, as they are (from 10.1.3.2 onwards) stored as individual XML files within a catalog filesystem.
Be sure to copy both the report XML file (in the format report+name with no file type suffix) and the accompanying attribute file (the same file name, with a .atr as a suffix) to the new catalog, the first file contains the report criteria definition in XML format whilst the accompanying attribute file contains the name of the request owner, the access control list and so on. Once you’ve copied these files across, they will appear in the new Web Catalog and will run as long as the relevant logical tables are present and correct in the RPD file.
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