Configuring Agents with OBIA and EBS Cookie Integration

Where I am currently working, we are using EBS and OBIEE in a setup with EBS Cookie Authentication (blog post on this soon). This has some draw backs. One draw back is Agents can not be used. When trying to run an agent under this setup, as a user authenticated via EBS Cookie, you will get the following error:

[OBI-SEC-00015] Unable to find user in identity store

I opened an SR at the time, and the response back was a reference to an existing Bug (Bug 10632223: AGENTS NOT WORKING IN EBS SSO ENVIRONMENT WITH OBIEE 11G) and an enhancement (Bug 8326835: INTRODUCE SUPPORT FOR DELIVERS WITH EBS ICX_COOKIE).

According to the Oracle Support person, neither has been implemented. Apparently, Agents were never intended to be used with EBS cookie users, but only with users contained directly in usable authentication systems (ie OID/OAM/LDAP, etc).

Obviously, this is not acceptable, so I went to work to find a solution to get Agents up and running. We are pretty lucky here, in that every user whom can access OBIEE can access all subject areas in OBIEE. This might be different for you, so the end result might require you to do additional work.

Continue on to read for an explanation of what I did to get Agents up and running.

How to Unit Test OBIA Informatica Changes

I've started getting into doing a bit of development with Informatica on our OBIA install (for reference, we are using OBIA 7.9.6.3 + Extension pack). Part of the "best practices" setup by our Oracle Consultant was to create a separate sandbox folder anytime we were making a change to an Infomratica mapping. The difficulty I had was how to test the workflow after I made my changes, as I can't run my change via DAC, without creating a separate execution plan, and I can't test directly in Infomratica, as it references a parameter file that exists on the server.

The solution was to extract the command that DAC would run (pmcmd), create a temporary parameter file, and then run my new mapping from my sandbox folder. And as always, I've created a helpful script to automate this!

Continue on to read for an explanation of what my script does, and a copy of said script.