Managed Reporting and Dashboard Migration Improvements in Release 5.3

By Emma Schwarz

With the release of WebFOCUS 5.3, Information Builders automated the Business Intelligence Dashboard migration utility and combined it with that of Managed Reporting to provide a unified migration utility encompassing both repositories. There were several reasons for making this change, which we expect will simplify the lives of WebFOCUS users.

Where Was Improvement Needed?

When migrating the Dashboard repository in previous WebFOCUS releases, manual steps were necessary to move Dashboard files to the new release. Moving the Managed Reporting repository required a second step. (The manual migration steps were described in "WebFOCUS Release 5 Migration," WebFOCUS Newsletter, May 2003.) Beginning with 5.3, Managed Reporting and Dashboard repository migrations have been merged into one utility.

What Changes Were Made?

After installation of a new instance of WebFOCUS 5.3, moving an existing application to the new release has been simplified substantially. The MRMIGRATE utility with which we all are familiar from previous releases performs not only migration of the Managed Reporting repository of users and procedures, but also includes Dashboard Views and users' personal Dashboard pages. In addition to performing a vital migration step when upgrading to a new release of WebFOCUS, MRMIGRATE is now doing double duty: It can also be used to move Managed Reporting and Dashboard repositories from one system to another. Do you have a test system you need to move into production? No problem. MRMIGRATE will extract the repositories from the test system and create a .zip file that can be transferred and loaded into the production system. The utility will move the entire application from one location to another, and does not require you to be using the same type of operating system for both instances.

What Does the Migration Utility Do?

The Managed Reporting repository is contained in the basedir directory under WebFOCUS. Dashboard views are located in the WebFOCUS/worp directory. For Managed Reporting and Dashboard to function correctly, these directories cannot be simply moved from one release to another. Some internal files have to be updated during the migration process.

That's where MRMIGRATE comes in. It checks your system for existing installations of WebFOCUS Managed Reporting, verifies with you what should be migrated, and then it extracts, transforms and loads the existing WebFOCUS repository into the updated repository files.

To get the best possible results, the migration utility in WebFOCUS 5.3 should be used to extract repository information from your old release. If the new and old releases are installed on the same system, the migration utility may be able to determine the location of the old release from its default location.

Otherwise, using the migration utility with the old release simply requires moving a few utility files to the old WebFOCUS release directory. The extract step creates a .zip file, which loads the repository to the new install.

After performing the extraction step, you must run MRMIGRATE a second time to perform the load step. The .zip file that was created during the extract phase is left in place, and can be saved in a secure location as a snapshot of the repository.