DAC server and OC4J as Windows services

As I'm sure you are all aware the DAC server runs as a batch command which lives in the user's session, so as soon as that session ends the command dies and the DAC server stops. This is a real pain for a server side app as at many clients the remote desktop sessions for users are automatically disconnected after a period of time. One way to get around this is to create scheduled server tasks to kick off the DAC server process just before the ETL starts. This is far from ideal however.

So, a while ago I came across this posting on MySupport (or Metalink as it was then) (ID 578174.1) which gave a suggestion for using a free utility called JavaService to install OC4J as a service. The utility is available here:

http://forge.ow2.org/projects/javaservice/

This got me to thinking about whether I could get the DAC server to run as a service, after a lot of playing around I finally got it working properly, you need to create the service using JavaService with this command:

javaservice -install "Oracle BI: DAC Service" "C:\Progra~1\Java\jdk1.5.0_17\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll" -Xms256m -Xmx1024m "-Djava.class.path=D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\ojdbc14.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\DAWSystem.jar;E:\OracleBI\;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\ant-1.6.5.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\antlr-2.7.6.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\ant-antlr-1.6.5.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\asm.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\asm-attrs.jar;c3p0-0.9.0.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\cglib-2.1.3.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\checkstyle-all.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\cleanimports;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\concurrent-1.3.2.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\connector.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\dom4j-1.6.1.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\ehcache-1.2.3.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\hibernate3.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jaas.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jacc-1_0-fr.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\javassist.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jaxen-1.1-beta-7.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jboss-cache.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jboss-common.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jboss-jmx.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jboss-system.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jdbc2_0-stdext.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jgroups-2.2.8.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jta.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\junit-3.8.1.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\log4j-1.2.11.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\proxool-0.8.3.jar;;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\versioncheck.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\xerces-2.6.2.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\xml-apis.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\jsr173_api.jar;D:\OracleBI\DAC\lib\sjsxp.jar" "-Duser.dir=D:\OracleBI\DAC" -start  com.siebel.etl.net.QServer -description "Oracle BI DAC Server Service"

Long I know :-) but the DAC server needs all those jars to work properly.  Obviously you need to change the paths if your OBIEE instance is not installed in D:\OracleBI

This should create a service which you can start and stop as any other Windows service and runs a perfectly functioning DAC server.

To get back to the OC4J document I found on MySupport (ID 578174.1) I tried it and initially it appeared to work but I soon realised that there were problems with the BI Publisher server (which runs in OC4J) which meant that the BI Publisher server could not access the report repository properly.

So I got to work trying to find out why this didn't work and eventually I worked it out, so here are the steps to get an OC4J windows service which allows the BI Publisher to work fully:

1. Copy the JavaService.exe executable to the directory OracleBI\oc4j_bi\bin you can rename it to something else if you want, I named it OC4JService.exe.  It is vitally important that you copy the executable to this location and use this executable to create the service, otherwise you will have problems with the BI Publisher server not being able to access the BI Publisher repository.
2. Using this executable create the Windows service.
3. OC4JJavaservice -install "Oracle BI: OC4J Service" "D:\jre1.5.0_17\bin\client\jvm.dll" -XX:MaxPermSize=128m "-Djava.class.path=D:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\oc4j.jar" -start oracle.oc4j.loader.boot.BootStrap -params -out "D:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\log\oc4j.log.txt" -err "D:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\log\oc4.err.txt" -current "D:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\bin" -description "Oracle BI Publisher Server"
   

Obviously the first parameter is a personal choice for the service name.  The second parameter is the location of the jre to use.  Leave the third parameter as is.  The fourth parameter is the location of the oc4j.jar, the main jar for OC4J.  The fifth parameter is the class to start from that jar, leave this as is.  The parameters after -params are optional and are just an output log, an error log and a description for the service.

Once the command in number 2 has finished the Windows service should be created and it should start, stop and operate normally.  The BI Publisher running from this service should work correclty and have full access to the report repository.