#bimobilehd

When helping customers with issue logs are key, and until recently getting logs from an iOS device has not been easy.  It required cords and a mac!  Well we have made this much easier and here is how it is done.

Using and iPad, open iOS Setting (note not our app settings, iOS settings)

Scroll to our app named Oracle BI HD and tap on it.  

There you can enable logging for our app.  We recommend leaving this setting turned off most of the time as it can impact performance.

Once enabled make sure our app is not running in the background by force quitting the app.  Here are instructions for this but iOS users typically know how it is done.

iOS 10 - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201330

iOS 11 - https://help.apple.com/ipad/11/#/iPad619935ea

Open our app and run through the scenario being tested and be sure to duplicate the issue that is being worked on.

Then goto our app settings and tap About.  At the bottom you should see a Share Logs option. 

Here you will be able to share logs to iCloud or other 3rd party storage along with email.  

We are working on a big iOS release and it is just about ready to launch.  You will have to wait to try it, but I wanted to share some of the key new features.  All I can say about release date is; coming soon...

Full iPhone Redesign 

This update brings our app up to date with iOS standards and is awesome on your phone!  We are sure you will love it and using it will feel natural and in line with iOS standards.

Updated Immersive Mode on the iPhone

Spotlight Search Support for BI Content

Leverage iOS Spotlight Search to quickly find and open BI content in our app.  Once you have opened a report or dashboard one time it will be available in Spotlight Search.

Native iOS Sharing on iPad and iPhone

Now you can share like you do in any other app.  As always select links or images, but not you can share to other apps on your device not just email.  text, photo editing, AirDrop and more.

There are also a ton of bug fixes and stability improvements.  We truly hope you love it when it drops. 

Coming Soon! 

Oh yea one more thing...

Capturing iOS Console logs can we tough especially if you are on a PC.  If you are on a Mac and you are a developer with Xcode installed it is really not that difficult.  In fact Apple fully supports this and documents the process. 

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/qa/qa1747/_index.html

For others without Mac’s things can get complex and with every new release of iOS there seems to be less and less options.  See our old blog on this topic.  All of these non-mac options no longer work on iOS 9.

http://bimobilelabs.com/post/59787593753/enabling-console-logging-for-obiee-mobile-hd

We have been able to work this out with the help of some 3rd party tools so we thought it made sense to share how we do it.  Keep in mind that we do not make the rules on this topic and we by no means endorse or write any of these 3rd party tools.

To start on windows you will need to download and install a copy of a program called iTools.  It can be found at the link below and on many popular download sites.

http://itools-for-windows.en.softonic.com

Please note that iTools is 3rd Party software and you should read the disclaimer at the bottom of this post.

Once installed you can follow some basic steps to get the device console logs. If you are debugging an issue with our BI Mobile HD application be sure to enable console logging in settings for our app.

Settings | Oracle BI HD | Console Logging

Once enabled run the test in the app that you want to debug and follow the steps below using iTools:

Open iTools

Connect your iOS device via USB and ensure it appears in iTools

On the main screen in iTools select the ‘Toolbox’ tab

From here you can select ‘Real-time Log’ to display console log

Once you have the log file, you can attach it to an email or update an SR so that the logs can be analyzed.

Third-Party Software Disclaimer

Any links to third-party software available on this website are provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied and such software is to be used at your own risk.

iOS 9 is just days away and I know from history that many of you will update your devices the day it launches.  I bet you won't even tell us :(  Don’t worry we have been testing our app with the betas and everything will be just fine no update needed from us.  We will also do a bunch more testing the day it drops to make sure you will not be impacted.

We are looking into some of the cool features like multi-tasking and 3D Touch but support for things like that will come later.

The Oracle BI Mobile HD app (iOS only) caches JavaScript and CSS files locally.   It does this the first time you connect wit a new server connection and can seen in the app during the connection process.

The Oracle BI Presentation Server uses a mechanism to ensure that Oracle BI Mobile HD app is up-to-date with the latest cached JavaScript and CSS files; it uses an MD5 hash of Oracle BI Presentation Server version string and analytics.ear content along with a user-defined "salt".  The mobile client will automatically download new manifest and refresh static files when Oracle BI Presentation Server version changes or analytics.ear file is modified.

An Administrator can force a refresh of this cache on the Oracle BI Mobile HD app by changing the user-defined "salt" by adding the following entry in the Presentation Server instanceconfig.xml file.

Note: For most new installs the VersionSalt entry will be a new addition to the existing StaticFiles Section.  The value of VersionSalt is a unique string that is different from the previous string (if the entry is already in the instanceconfig.xml file).  A sequence number or GUID is recommended.

If the entries do not exist, you may add the 'Cache' and 'StaticFiles' tags. You will add the tags inside the ServerInstance entry.

<WebConfig xmlns="oracle.bi.presentation.services/config/v1.1">    <ServerInstance>         .......          <Cache>              <StaticFiles>                <VersionSalt>34f2c76f-774b-4225-afc3-59f794f43d8d</VersionSalt>            </StaticFiles>        </Cache>       .......    </ServerInstance> </WebConfig>

Hint: You can obtain a unique GIUD string from many sites or tools like this one:

http://www.guidgen.com/

After modifying the file be sure to restart the Oracle BI Presentation Server.

The details on the location of the instanceconfig.xml file please see the following document:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/bi.1111/e10541/configsettings.htm#BIESG1630

For details on starting and stopping the Oracle BI Presentation Server please see the following document:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/bi.1111/e10541/components.htm#BIESG102

Once you reconnect with BI Mobile App, you will see "Downloading one-time application resources"

Note: This only affects the iOS Mobile app, it does not affect the Desktop browser or Android app.

For the official support document on this topic see the following:

You may have noticed an iOS update for our BI Mobile app yesterday.  Nothing to really worry about, just some bug fixes.  Pretty isolated stuff that most of our users won't hit these bugs, but we felt it was important enough so 'smash' them right away, and not wait for our next feature release.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oracle-business-intelligence/id534035015?mt=8

BI is about data and visualizations so we think that our app's chrome and controls should get our of your way when you are working with your data.  We did this from the start with Android.

And now we are working to give you this same experience in our iOS apps.  

We are woking hard on our next update and this is something we hope to deliver.  For now consider this lab work and remember:

A video tutorial for creating a new Xcode 5.x project using the Oracle BI Mobile HD Security Toolkit.

This video goes along with our document for the Security Toolkit that can be found here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-enterprise-edition/building-the-bi-mobile-hd-app-1993081.pdf