Problem with using domain name with user ID when logging in.

We have multiple LDAP / AD servers setup for out BI server, and users from muitilple domain are able to access BI with no issues. However I didnt knew, till today, that we can prefix domain name to user ID when logging into BI. For example:

northam/arunk

where northam is the windows domain name and arunk is the network ID. It does lets you in, but it wrecks the initialization blocks logic, as it will pass northam/arunk as ID not arunk. Unless the initializatiob block has logic to handle this, the logic will be broken and you will get unexpected results in output for reports which have data level security. One of our user was getting following error due to this:

View Display Error

Odbc driver returned an error (SQLExecDirectW).

Error Details

Error Codes: OPR4ONWY:U9IM8TAC:OI2DL65P

State: HY000. Code: 10058. [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: HY000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred. [nQSError: 17001] Oracle Error code: 1722, message: ORA-01722: invalid number at OCI call OCIStmtExecute:

This was happening, because one of the filter was expecting a number from session variable, but was getting a null. When I asked the user not to use domain name, issue got resolved.

Multiple LDAP servers

OBIEE does allow us to add multiple LDAP server. We needed this functionality as some of the global users were on different domain than the majority of users. Apparently when more than one LDAP servers are configured, BI attempts to get user authenticated with first server in the list, if it fails then it tries using second LDAP server.

This method can also be user for implementing redundant LDAP servers.

Changing log level for LDAP users

We use LDAP server to authenticate BI users. One of the user was having problem with a report which no one else had. In order to track this issue, we wanted to increase log level for only one user to 5. However we could not do this on a per user bases for LDAP.

Looking at session variables I found a work around for this. Navigate to system session variables, right click and create a 'New LOGLEVEL'. You can give default value of 2, or any other which will get applied to all users.

Next, create a session Initialization block loglevel and select any database as datasource. In the query, you can specify following:

select case when (':USER') = 'user1' then to_number('5',0) else to_number('2',0) end from dual

Select target variable as LOGLEVEL. Doing this will make log level of 5 for user1 but it will remain as 2 for all others.

Also, although valid log level value is upto 7, actual value in current version is only upto 5. Values 6 and 7 is reserved for future use.