Tag Archives: pbcs

PBCS Scripting with Groovy using the PBJ REST API Library

I was talking to a colleague the other day that wants to do some scripting with PBCS using Groovy. Of course, since PBCS has a REST API, we can do scripting with pretty much any modern language. There are even some excellent examples of scripting with PBCS using Groovy out there.

However, since Groovy runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), we can actually leverage any existing Java library that we want to – including the already existing PBJ library that provides a super clean domain specific language for working with PBCS via its REST API. To make things nice and simple, PBJ can even be packaged as an “uber jar” – a self-contained JAR that contains all of its dependency JARs. This can make things a little simpler to manage, especially in cases where PBJ is used in places like ODI.

For this example I’m going to take the PBJ library uber jar, add it to a new Groovy project (in the IntelliJ IDE), then write some code to connect, fetch the list of applications, then iterate over those and print out the list of jobs in each application.

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PBCS has a REST API, now what?

Note: this article was originally written for an ODTUG publication, but it never wound up getting published. So I thought I would just post it here instead.

Oracle’s Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service – PBCS – is the first Hyperion product to get the full cloud treatment. In addition to Planning’s move to the cloud, it has picked up a couple of new tricks. One of these new features is a REST API. This article will give a quick background on REST APIs, some integration opportunities now available to PBCS users, and information on how the PBCS REST API can be easily used from Java.

For those that aren’t familiar, a REST API typically means a few things to developers. First of all, an API is an application programming interface. From a developer standpoint, an API gives us the ability to write programs that interact with another system in a specific way. In the case of PBCS, the API provides access to functionality such as refreshing a cube, launching a business rule, uploading files, getting member information, and more.

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Deleting multiple files from PBCS using PBJ client

Earlier in the week, my archnemesis colleague Cameron Lackpour hosted a guest blog article by Chris Rothermel with a trick for deleting multiple files from PBCS using the epmautomate tool. The basic idea is that you can use the listfiles command to export the list of files to a temporary file, then use some batch scripting to iterate over every line in that file, then call epmautomate to delete the specific file. It’s a good example that will undoubtedly come in useful for many people.

Upon reading the article I thought it would interesting to do the same thing, but using the PBJ library. The PBJ library is an open source, 100% Java library for interacting with PBCS via its REST API. It can easily be dropped in to enterprise Java projects by including its dependency in your Maven configuration file (if you’re so inclined). The PBJ library is also used in at least one major piece of software: it’s the library that allows Drillbridge to perform upper level drill from PBCS to a relational database.

That all said, one of the nice things about having a domain specific library in a high-level language such as Java is that it is sometimes very easy and straightforward to implement functionality that doesn’t come out of the box. This doesn’t make it better than the batch scripting technique, just different.

Here’s the whole code file:

package com.jasonwjones.pbcs.misc;

import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.PbcsClient;
import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.PbcsClientFactory;
import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.TestHarness;
import com.jasonwjones.pbcs.interop.impl.ApplicationSnapshot;

public class DeleteAllFiles extends TestHarness {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		PbcsClient client = new PbcsClientFactory().createClient(createConnection());
		
		for (ApplicationSnapshot snapshot : client.listFiles()) {
			client.deleteFile(snapshot.getName());
		}
	}

}

Most of this is pretty standard boilerplate Java. You can that after we setup a PbcsClient instance, we can very easily get a list of files (using listFiles()), and then iterate over those. To delete a file, we can use the deleteFile(String filename) method and pass in the actual file name from the “snapshot” object (which also contains a little bit of other information).

That all said, as I’ve written before, the best tool for the job is the one that fits in to your environment the best and is easiest to maintain. If you’re doing much in the way of batch scripting, then epmautomate is probably going to fit into your environment the best. If you’re writing an enterprise app in Java, you’re going to absolutely want to use the PBJ library rather than try and execute shell commands.