OBIEE -- Strange error & Interesting Solution "You cannot publish to the Apps Library because you do not have write permission on the /Apps folder in catalog."

Today, I m going to write about Oracle Business Intelligence, the thing that I used in my MBA project in 2011.

The thing that made me write this, is a case which was escalated to me by our OBIEE team.
The team was trying to publish Mobile Application reports during an OBIEE project implementation, but this error was the blocker.

Before giving you this strange error and its workaround/solution; first take a look at the mobile apps reports deployment process.

These kinds of deployments are done into the filesystem, into the location that is pointed by Apps folder.

So in order to be able to deploy, one needs to make this configuration first.

Without this configuration, you end up with the following;

As I mentioned, in order to publish mobile app reports in OBIEE, a configuration is required. If you attempt to publish without configuration, an error will be received.  -> "Apps Library is not configured correctly. Please make sure that you setup configuration file for Apps Library."

The steps for the required configuration are as follows:

cd $ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/bi/bidata/components/bipublisher/repository/Admin/Configuration
vim xmlp-server-config.xml

The xml file is opened via the 'vim' command, and the following command is added to the file.
<property name="APPS_LIBRARY_FOLDER_LOCAL" value="/Apps"/>

Then the bimad and bipublisher components are restarted. A new folder named Apps is added under Shared folders in the Catalog.

Well.. After this configuration , you should be able to deploy your Mobile Application reports... 

Okay.. Now, let's take a look at the strange part :)

Although the above steps are completed correctly, you still may not able to deploy your Mobile Application reports due to the error ""You cannot publish to the Apps Library because you do not have write permission on the /Apps folder in catalog."

If the following error appears (after clicking Publish button), the permissions of the folder should be checked first. 

If folder permissions are okay, then this error should be caused by the URL that you reach the Mobile Apps deployment pages.

I mean, this problem may occur in the OBIEE environments which have a load balancer on front.

The problem is caused by the underlying security engine.. It just can't verify the rights when the url is different than the one it is expecting. (Load balancer url is always different than the actual url that the applications are operating) 

As you may guess, the workaround for this problem is to use the actual url. (in the form of "http://hostname:port/analytics" )

The fix would be defining a OBIEE-aware virtual host or having a OBIEE-aware & proper Load Balancer configuration.. Note that, I didn't implement this fix...

The workaround worked in our case.. Those deployment pages are only used by the OBIEE developers anyways.

I wanted to share this with you, because I checked Google, Oracle Support and Oracle Community but couldn't find any known solution or a workaround for this problem. (except this blog post :) )