In the last post we showed how to get OBIEE set up for customisation. Now lets look at using that to start making OBIEE look like it belongs a bit more in our company.

Just about all of the text on the OBIEE pages is customisable, as all of that text is defined in XML files that are loaded when the Presentation Server is started. Previously we set up a CustomMessages directory that was made available to OBI through weblogic. This directory is the one that PS now checks first when starting up, for the XML messages files and takes any that it finds there in preference to the default messages that were installed with OBI.

Creating a Custom Message

The easiest way to create the first custom message is to copy one of the defaults. So, for the login page lets take

• {Oracle_Home}/bifoundation/web/msgdb/l_en/messages/logonmessages.xml

and copy it to

• …CustomMessages/l_en/logonmessages.xml

When we look at the file through a text editor, we see that each piece of text on the logon screen is contained within a WebMessage XML tag. We only need to keep the ones that we are editing, if we want the defaults then we can delete them from our custom file.

So, for example, we use an LDAP source for authentication. As such people use their network password to log on to OBI. To stop any confusion, we can change the “Password” field to hold the label “Network Password”. After that our custom XML file will read as:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<WebMessageTables xmlns:sawm="com.siebel.analytics.web/message/v1">
<WebMessageTable lang="en-us" system="Logon" table="Messages">

<WebMessage name="kmsgAuthenticatePassword"><TEXT>Password</TEXT></WebMessage>

</WebMessageTable>
</WebMessageTables>