Missing "Treat Text As" options in OBIEE 11g

Something I used to use back in OBIEE 10g was the Override Default Data Format for text to do things with HTML in my Answers Requests. I had assumed this would be available the same way out of the box with 11g, but alas it is not.

What I get:	What I want:

So as always, I did a little digging, and found that in order to have all options show, you need to have the privilege: Save System-Wide Column Formats. What's even better is that out of the box, this privilege is assigned to no one, so you can't even set it!

Continue on to read what I did to allow me to enable the setting for BI Administrators, and finally gain access to all the treat text as options.

First things first, a word of warning, Save System-Wide Column Formats can be very powerful. You more than likely do not want to grant this privilege to most users, as they could potential make system level changes.

With that said, here are the steps I took to enable the option. Note that you might see some other blogs or posts that state you need to add a HardenXSS tag to your instanceconfig file. This is not the case, as this tag was deprecated by Oracle with 11.1.1.5. If you add this tag, your OBIEE Presentation Services will fail to start.

1. Open the Web Catalog in offline mode.





2. Navigate to the following folder:

System -> Privs -> FormatSystemPrivs





3. Double click on the item 'Edit Formats'
4. Click on 'Edit Privs'



5. Choose the roles that should have this privilege (ex: biadministrator)





6. Click Ok.
7. Click Ok again.
8. Redeploy the modified Web Catalog, and restart the presentation services.

Now, when logging into OBIEE as a user with BI Administrator role, you will see the menu now has all options.

Have fun!