Short and sweet post…a follow up will come later with more details!
If you have played around with Essbase Cloud Service (EssCS) at all, you may have noticed a couple items on the Utilities tab. Specifically the “Export Utility” and the “Command Line Tool”.
I download these to see how they worked and hope to save you the time it took me to figure the scripts out!
Export Utility – export an Essbase outline to an Excel-formatted book that can be uploaded to EssCS.
When you download the Export Utility, it will download a zipped file named “dbxtool.zip”. I unzipped this to my C:\ directory and went exploring. The first place I stopped was the readme.txt to get some clarification on what to do to export the outline.
Well, that doesn’t help. And the Help guide didn’t help with this, either.
So, I decided to open the export.bat in Notepad++ in the folder C:\dbxtool\dbxtool\bin
I see that it’s not a GUI, but, rather, and command line interface. I’ll try to open it via the command line (Run as Administrator).
When I try to run “export.bat”, I am hit with my missing parameters. Progress!
So, if I am to run this export script successfully, it should look like the following:
export -server {servername}:1423 -application {appname} -cube {databasename} -data -user {username} -password {password} -path {exportpath}
Note that “-data” will export all the data in the database and is NOT required!
Because port 32776 is not open on my server, this will fail. …Which is why a follow up will come as soon as the port is open!
Now you know how to use the Export Utility!
Command Line Tool – a way to interact with EssCS cubes via the command line.
Unlike the Export Utility, the Command Line Tool (CLI) had a readme.txt that was helpful.
The very (!) first thing you need to do is redirect your JAVA_HOME environment variable to jdk1.8 (you may need to download it first!). For another piece of software I use, I am required to use 1.7, so I needed to reset the JAVA_HOME from 1.7 to 1.8. And note it is JDK, not JRE! I made this mistake, please don’t you make it either!
I was able to run this the same way I ran the Export Utility, via the command line as an administrator. Since the readme.txt was helpful, I got started on this tool right away. Again, I just wanted to see how it worked versus using it for real purposes (well, I guess logging in is real…). I can trust the readme.txt!
From here you can do many things such as export/import an LCM file, build dimensions, load data, execute scripts…many things. Have a look!
as an FYI there are a few things you need to know when running EssCLI. First, because you are going against a Linux server in EssCS, many things are case sensitive and second, if you create a bat script to run thses, you need to add a Call or cmd/c infront of the Esscli statements or the script will exit after the first call (This is when you run from Windows)