OBIEEbeginner
Presentation Services & Catalog
Understand the role of Presentation Services and the web catalog in storing dashboards, analyses, and permissions.
Presentation Services renders the interface and owns the web catalog. The catalog is the half that matters operationally.
The RPD is like a company's org chart and data-access policy; the catalog is like the shared drive of documents everyone actually works with day to day — different systems, both needed, and both have their own permission models.
Key Concepts
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What the catalog holds. Every saved analysis, dashboard, prompt, filter, agent and folder, with its
permissions, as files on disk.
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/shared/Sales/Dashboards/Executive Summary
/shared/Sales/Analyses/Revenue by Region
/users/asha/My Folders/...3
It is file-based, which is why it can be copied, archived, searched and compared — unlike the RPD, which is
a binary.
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Catalog Manager is the tool. Opened online or against the files directly, it supports bulk operations
that the web interface does not:
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find every analysis referencing a subject area
rename a column reference across hundreds of objects
copy a folder between environments
report on permissions6
The bulk rename is the one that matters. When the RPD renames a presentation column, existing analyses
still reference the old name and break. Catalog Manager can rewrite them all in one pass.
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Without it, that is a person opening analyses one at a time.
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Permissions are per object and inherited from folders. This is separate from RPD data security, and
confusing the two is the standard mistake:
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catalog permission can you open this dashboard
RPD data security which rows do you see once it opens10
A user denied catalog access sees no dashboard. A user with access but no data security sees an empty
dashboard. Different symptoms, different fixes, and users report both as "it does not work".
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Deployment between environments. The catalog is archived and unarchived — an .catalog file — which
moves objects with their permissions.
.catalog
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The risk is overwriting. Unarchiving over a folder replaces what is there, including work somebody did
directly in the target. Production catalogs accumulate user-created content, which is why full overwrites
are avoided in favour of moving specific folders.
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And the thing to keep out of it. Personal folders under /users grow indefinitely, including the
folders of people who left. They are part of the catalog, part of the backup, and part of nobody's
housekeeping until the disk fills.
/users
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What the interviewer is probing.1. "What is the web catalog?" Probing: the vocabulary. Stalls: "A folder." Moves up: the
filesystem storing analyses, dashboards, filters and prompts as objects with their own permissions,
separate from the RPD.
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2. "How should the catalog be structured?" Probing: the governance. Stalls: "Any way."
Moves up: shared folders by function with permissions on folders rather than objects, and personal
folders kept out of production reporting.
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3. "How do you move content between environments?" Probing: the practical skill. Stalls:
"Copy files." Moves up: catalog manager archive and unarchive, or the command line — not
filesystem copying, which breaks internal references.
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4. "What goes wrong with catalog growth?" Probing: experience. Stalls: "Nothing." *Moves
up:* thousands of abandoned personal objects slow startup and search, so archiving and cleanup need
to be scheduled.