OBIEE 11g Repository Documentation: Extracting metadata from the RPD

by
March 8, 2012

With OBIEE 11g there are two methods to extract metadata from the RPD.
The first one uses the admintool.exe command to generate metadata. It was already around in OBIEE 10g. However, the syntax has changed slightly. The second uses the biserverxmlgen command.

Admintool

This is an unsupported and undocumented feature. Use at your own risk.
You have to create a command file that is then invoked by admintool.exe.

Parameters
<path to RPD>: Path to your RPD, e.g. D:OracleMiddlewareinstancesinstance1bifoundationOracleBIServerComponentcoreapplication_obis1repositorymyrpd.rpd
<RPD Password>: The password to your RPD
<path to output file>: Location on file system where the RPD metadata will be output to. The extension of <path to output file> determines the type of output: (1) .csv (comma-separated values) (2) .txt (tab-separated values) (3) .xml XML
<encoding>: Unicode, ANSI, UTF-8
You can call the command file by using the following command (This has not changed from OBIEE 10g.)

biserverxmlgen

I can see three advantages of using biserverxmlgen over admintool
(1) The Admintool /command syntax is not documented or supported
(2) The output of biserverxmlgen is more comprehensive, e.g. it contains information such as the alias in the presentation layer
(3) It may be easier to extract this. I have not tried this out, but to extract some of the info from the admintool extract can be a bit of pain, as there is a recursive relationship between logical and derived logical columns. Not sure if there is an XSD for this XML. If you have any info on this let me know.
The syntax for this is: