The OBIEE RPD is a very powerful tool but sometimes it can be difficult to merge things in or make mass changes. Luckily there are two little known tools that make such changes very easy and they’re already installed on your server. The nqUDMLgen.exe takes an RPD and outputs it to an editable UDML file. nqUDMLExec.exe takes a UDML file and creates an RPD from it.
It is important to note that both nqUDMLgen.exe and nqUDMLExec.exe are unofficial and unsupported. So use at your own risk.
nqUDMLgen.exe will be in the OracleBI\server\bin folder on your BI server (in 10.3.x versions).
The syntax to use nqUDMLgen.exe is as follows:
-u Username
-P password
-R RPD path
-O output
After nqUDMLgen runs there will be an output file which can be opened for editing.
UDML is the abbreviation of Universal Database Markup Language and can be difficult to traverse. Because of that if you have a difficult time reading the file I’d suggest using UDMLparser found at http://code.google.com/p/udmlparser/ it too is unsupported but it does present the data in an easier to read format. For me however, I tend to find that textpad is enough for what I need to do.
Once in the UDML file you can do search and replaces, and what you like. Be careful where you tread however, deleting or changing the ids will brick your RPD.
A handy thing that most people don’t notice is when you copy an object in the RPD it can be pasted to a text document and it will put in the UDML for the objects.
If care is taken you can paste the UDML into the output UDML file created earlier and then run nqUDMLExec.exe to create a new RPD with the new objects.
The syntax to use nqUDMLExec.exe is as follows:
-u Username
-P password
-I input UDML file
-O output RPD
After it’s complete it will excitedly tell you it’s a “Complete Success!!!” (yes, three exlamation points no less).
Then the new RPD is available for use. Opening it shows that the changes were merged in successfully.
Again, use with extreme caution but this is a handy little trick to get some of the more tedious things that need to be done with the RPD.
Have you run this utility in OBIEE 11g, yet? I’ve been running it in 10 for awhile. When I try to run it in 11g, I get an error because it’s looking for NQLocale.xml in /oracle/home/bifoundation/server/locale. It’s actually in MIDDLEWARE_HOME/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/server/locale. Is there an environment variable that I can set to point to the right location?
Thanks.
Jerry
Sadly I haven’t used this in 11g, however, I have run other utilities and have gotten those to work by using the old 10 files. Of course I should note, like I did in the post itself that this is not technically supported. But you could try to copy the file to the desired location or you could merge them in your 10 environment and move that to the 11g one. Best of luck!