OBIEE 11g Changing the Default Dashboard

Posted by Kishore Uppalapati

A common question I come across is how do we set the default homepage in OBIEE 11g?

 

I.e. How do we change the first dashboard that the user sees when they log in?

Essentially the approach is the same as in previous versions but forthose of you who don’t know, here are the basic steps.

*Changing the homepage for a single user*

For a one-off change for a particular user, either sign in as them or get them to sign in. Click the down arrow next to their name (top right) and go to My Account. Then under the Preference tab > Starting Page choose the desired Dashboard.

*Changing the homepage for all users*

Edit your repository and create a new Initialisation Block for a Session variable. You can name this whatever you like. Choose the appropriate Connection Pool for your RDBMS. Edit the datasource and enter a dummy sql statement to get the dashboard path. You can figure out the path to use by examining the url in the application itself.

E.g. For Oracle

select '/shared/folder_name/_portal/dashboard_name' from dual

E.g. For SQL Server

select '/shared/folder_name/_portal/dashboard_name'

Click ‘Edit Data Target’ and create a new variable. Enter the name as PORTALPATH. This is a system (reserved) variable and used solely for this purpose.

Click ‘Test’ to verify your variable is being set correctly and assuming everything is ok, log out and back in to check the correct dashboard appears first.

*Changing the homepage for to be different on a per user/group basis*

Use the same approach as above but store the user/group and dashboard path settings in a database table. You can then include a where clause in your sql to get the appropriate dashboard path according to the logged-on user.