OBIEE – Working with BLOB Image Content

Right … Since I know little bit ! about Oracle Application Express (APEX) (formerly known as HTMLDB from its birth) before I familiar with OBIEE and Siebel Analytics hence I thought of doing some experiment on BLOB(Binary Large Object)  image addition in OBIEE .Unfortunately OBIEE simply doesn’t support BLOB data type content . If you add the BLOB field in Repository and try to view data the column will not be displayed and even not thrown error .

However BI Catalog will generate a objection which is a erratic ORA error. Now try to google around what is the cause and landed to the Famous Blog of Venkat and yeah ! most of the information has been compiled nicely here and got some understanding as I have some idea about how the PL/SQL gateway works and communicate with OPMN process running Apache Web Server .

Still as this is more likely the integration part of OBIEE with APEX that how image extracted by passing the parameters in APEX via PL/SQL gateway .So I do think people need some more idea about APEX . Considering the  integration its worth to take some brief  idea from :

“Defining and Viewing BLOB Data in Oracle Application Express 3.1″

Look on Dimitri’s Blog space also .

OBE(Oracle By Example)  is rocking in providing such kind of very helpful and bootstrapping technical information . Rest of it left to Venkat’s URL . Once I have proper setup in place I will must do a experiment in this area and update 

One more note, APEX is rocking as well with lots of features , enhancement and is a really handy tool for doing database centric web operations .See you next time in a new category area “APEX”

Display Data Base Images on report

Inspired by one of post in OTN forum on how to populate data base images on a native report, here assumptions are database having image URL, images are residing in image resource folder.

To do that first keep all images files in OracleBI\web\app\res\s_oracle10\images i.e fmap:images\xyz.jpg

Keep all image file names (with file extn) in database as required.

Exp: Suppose geo dimension with

South as south.jpg

West as west.jpg

East as east.jpg,

North as north.jpg

To display images on report:

Add image’s column to report

(Just to illustrate example I have added image file names in ERROR_TEXT in Usage track Schema.)

Click on Column Properties, go to Data Format tab

Check “Override Default Data Format” and from drop down choose “Custom Text Format”

In Custom Text Format edit box place following script.

@[html]" < !-- img src="\\analytics\\res\\s_oracle10\\images\\""@H""" -- > "(Please uncomment html tags)

Browse report, images url's will be fetched from database appended with resource file displayed on report.

Here is a good example on how to embed image on a web page with various options.