How to Manage Dashboard View Inheritance

By Emma Schwarz

In my last article (Dashboard Change Management in Release 5, WebFOCUS Newsletter, Sept. 2003) I described Change Management in the Business Intelligence Dashboard, including moving a user’s personalizations from one system to another. This time I will describe how to create a user’s My View and how to change the view inheritance for a particular user once it has been established.

How is it decided which user gets which “look and feel”? User inheritance is determined once, at the very first login. If a user logs in for the first time from a "public view," the user inherits the look and content from said view. But if a user logs in for the first time from a “group view” or the login page, the user inherits the look and content from the “general public view.”

It sounds confusing, but the rule is that users always inherit the general public view as their My View. The only exception is when a user logs in the first time from a public view other than the general public view, in which case the user inherits the look and content of the public view from which he or she just logged in.

That very first login creates a subdirectory for the user in the worp_users directory, and an entry in the conf/mpv.xml file for that user. The user’s directory contains content information in the form of the personal.xml file, whereas the mpv.xml contains view inheritance information. Any authenticated user is free to update and add to the content area of her My View, and when she does this, her personal.xml file is updated.

Here’s a real-life scenario: I’ve logged into the Dashboard from a specific public view and then personalized my content. Now I’d like to change my "look" to that of a different public view. How do I do that?

It’s tricky but possible. Edit the ibi/WebFOCUS52/worp/conf/mpv.xml file using a text editor such as WordPad. Search within this file for the login ID of the Managed Reporting user you want to update. A view inheritance designation for the user will be found in a block of code labeled <MUV>. You can change the view_folder and view_name designations to match the look of the public view you want the user to inherit.

Here’s another real-life scenario: I’m developing a Dashboard view, and during the development phase I logged in so that I could evaluate my application from the point of view of an authenticated user. Now I’ve gone back into the View Builder and made more changes in the content area for the view, and I want the user’s view to be updated with the new content. How do I do that? This is also a little tricky to do, so follow these steps carefully. The administrator has to delete the user’s directory from the worp_users directory and delete the user’s inheritance information from the mpv.xml file. Next the user must log in again so that a new user folder will be created in the worp_users directory and new inheritance information in the mpv.xml. Lastly, if you did any personalization in the user’s My View, you need to make the changes again. In this case, you can’t just delete the user’s directory from worp_users, because the Dashboard will find the user’s inheritance information in the mpv.xml file and assume the folder has already been created.

Remember that you must reload the WebFOCUS Web application or recycle the Web server, after making changes to files in the WebFOCUS/worp directory structure as described above, otherwise the updated files will not be available.