OBIEEbeginner
Presentation Services & Catalog
Understand the role of Presentation Services and the web catalog in storing dashboards, analyses, and permissions.
Presentation Services is the user-facing tier of OBIEE — it renders the dashboards, analyses, prompts, and answers the interactive requests users make in a browser. It's easy to underestimate in interviews because it feels like "just the UI," but it owns two things that matter enormously in real deployments: session state and the web catalog.
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
1
The web catalog is a hierarchical, file-system-like repository (physically stored under $FMW_HOME/instances/instanceN/bifoundation/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obipsN/catalog/) that holds every saved analysis, dashboard, prompt, filter, agent, and their associated permissions as XML-like objects. Unlike the RPD (which is a compiled binary metadata model), the catalog is largely text/XML-based, which is why catalog manager tools and even careful manual archive/unarchive operations are viable migration techniques.
$FMW_HOME/instances/instanceN/bifoundation/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obipsN/catalog/
2
Presentation Services also manages user sessions, including session variables (some seeded from the RPD, some from Presentation Services itself), personalization, and the rendering of views (tables, pivot tables, graphs, maps). It applies presentation-layer permissions on top of whatever the BI Server already filtered at the data level — so security is enforced in two places: RPD-level (data security) and catalog-level (object/functional security).
user sessions
3
For interviews, the key distinction to nail is: RPD = business model + physical mapping + security policies for data; Catalog = saved content + folder permissions + who can see which dashboard. Confusing the two is a common junior mistake that senior interviewers listen for.
RPDCatalog