User unable to view any dashboards or reports to which he has access

We had  a new OBIEE user, that was added to an application role, but was still not able to vew dashboards and reports. This user did not have any subject area access, nor did he have access to create new reports / analysis. The user was just BI Publisher consumer which were also added to dashboards, and not for Analysis reports. We checked following, but nothing seems to fix the issue:

-The user was added to an application role, and this application role had read permission to the folder, right from root, all the way to dashboard and report level.
-The user was part of the application role that had access to my reports and my dashboards area.
-Other users part of same application role were able to view dashboards intended for the role.
-We were unable to add user directly to catalog group (or any user)
-When admin used 'act as' functionality, the dashboard was still not showing up even for admin

After trying several combination, we added the user to another application role, to see how permissions change. After doing this, we noticed that user was able to view the new dashboards as well as the dashboard which he was intended to view. Next, we removed the user from newly added role, and now the dashboard permissions kept working.

Appears to be clearly a bug. For solution like these the going goes, implementing BI is an art, as echoed by my client as well. It is more true for OBIEE 11g per say. Just an FYI, we had this issue on 11.1.1.6.9

Arun~

OBIEE login takes forever

When trying to login to BI server, we were getting a perpetual message :

Logging in... please wait.

We checked the presentation server, BI server, memory, CPU, hard disk free space, temp files, you name it, all was good. Turns out, database server was the culprit. A simple query like :

Select * from w_day_d

was running for over 5 mins. Asked DBAs to do their magic, and sure enough, everything was back to normal. But why in the name of god, login would hang up if database is preoccupied? Why can’t BI log you in and show a blank page in you’re My Folders?

Answer: Initialization blocks. Every time someone logs in, all session variables are populated, and till the results from BI comes back, BI would ask user to wait.

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.