UDML in Oracle BI Server

I recently learned a way to retrieve and manipulate the Oracle BI repository file without using the Admin Tool. Although they are not officially documented and supported, they are extensively used by many savvy users. You can see the following screen shot to get the idea on how to retrieve the repository definition in a text format.

UDML is the abbreviation for Universal Database Markup Language. It is an undocumented and unsupported API for the Oracle BI Server. Since it is not published, I guess that the syntax is not frozen. This is probably the reason why it is not officially supported.

The simplest way to get the UDML definition for a given object is to use the Copy and Paste interface.

In addition to the Copy and Paste interface, you can also generate the UDML file via the command line tool, UDML Generator. The command line tool can generate the entire repository in a text format.

This remind me that Oracle Report tool in Oracle Developer can also generate the text version of report file. Normally the tool can open and save the report definition file with the extension rdf. You can also save the file as a text file. The beauty is that the text version can also be opened by the tool, so I can use script language, such as PERL to manipulate the definition.

The design philosophy is the same in Oracle BI server. You can use another command tool, UDML Executor. This command line tool can modify the RPD file by combining the fragment you define in the UDML file with the input repository and generate a output repository.