Oracle BI + WebDAV

Integrating Oracle BI with other technologies is always an interesting topic.  One such integration is taking Oracle BI components and/or output, mainly output, and integrating it with WebDav.  Typically the questions comes across as, “Can we integrate Oracle BI and Sharepoint?”  Though I answered that question in detail on this post two years ago (wow, really two years ago? How time goes by when you are having fun!), many people are still attempting the integration.  I basically recommend the WebDav option depending on a client’s requirements and even with that recommendation, team typically don’t understand how to either conduct the integration or test the integration in Sandbox environment.

So, this post won’t give you a step-by-step (I’ll save that when I actually have time…hmm…), but it will point you in the right direction on how to conduct the integration and test it in a sandbox/laptop environment.  First, with Oracle BI (Not BI Publisher) you will ultimately need to write some Java Code.  You can create a custom Java Job to be run in the Oracle BI Job Manager (Good for Oracle BI 10g and 11g) or you will need to create an Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) and deploy that to the WLS server to leverage Java code via the Oracle BI 11g Action Framework.

The Java code you write should implement a very brilliant Java/WebDav library called, Sardine.  This is the brain-child of Jon Scott Stevens and Sardine is Open-Source code (hosted on Google) that you can easily implement in your Java coding.

The next thing you will need to test implement your code and movement of objects to a WebDav server is a WebDAV server.  But what if you don’t have dev/test environment at your company or they won’t let give you access to it.  We’ll you’ll need to go get your own to run on your local environment.  The fastest and easiest way to do that is to use a project from none other than the Apache Foundation called JackRabbit.  JackRabbit is a standalone WebDAV server that starts as basically a singleton server instance under a Java Virtual Machine.  Instructions and step-by-step startup procedures are listed on the JackRabbit site.

Now all together you should have a Java IDE, Oracle BI 11g, JackRabbit, and Sardine.  Write some custom Java Code (you are on your own for now) and you’ll have a fully functioning Oracle BI + WebDAV implementation ready to dev, test, and demo.

Best of Luck!

References:

http://jackrabbit.apache.org/

http://jackrabbit.apache.org/standalone-server.html