For Instance

Bit of a techie one today, a short introduction to instanceconfig.xml.

Instanceconfig.xml (we’ll call it IC) is a configuration file for the Analytics web. It is a replacement for using the registry. You could use the registry but there’s little point, and you probably won’t have access rights anyway.

The IC file sits in C:SiebelAnalyticsDataWebconfig and is installed with the application. The basic installation provides a simple set of instructions to the Web component (see below), which one can add to or change.

The basic module looks like this, (i have removed the lead<)
?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
webconfig>
serverinstance>
dsn>
AnalyticsWeb
/dsn>
javahome>
C:/j2sdk1.4.2_08
/javahome>
catalogpath>
C:/SiebelAnalyticsData/web/catalog/Majendi_dev.webcat
/catalogpath>
catalogmaxautosaves>
10
/catalogmaxautosaves>
alerts>
scheduleserver>
UK_SRV_123
/scheduleserver>
/alerts>
/serverinstance>
/webconfig>

Notice the opening tag, ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
. This will be present in all the xml files in Analytics. Make sure you don’t place anything before this, including spaces (As I found out the hard way).
The javahome>
tag points to your installation of Java SDK. Make sure there are no spaces in the path or this will fail.
The catalogpath> is easy to understand, and here I have renamed the catalog to Majendi_dev.webcat. If you put a name of a file that does not exist in this key then Analytics will create it for you.
The dsn> tag provides the name for ODBC connections.

You may notice that there is a sub-section for Alerts, which, in this case, tells the web server where to find the scheduling server.

There is no simple source or reference to tell you what other tags may be added, and what their settings are (I’ll try to put one in by book), but you can glean hints from other peoples SR’s and from bookshelf!

If you add a views tag then you can customise the number of rows. Try adding the following

resultrowlimit>12000
/resultrowlimit>

This a basic one, it increase the maximum number of rows that Analytics will return (the default setting is 10,000)

Other more complex ones can change small behaviours within the system, for example,

pivotview>
maxvisiblepages>
1000
/maxvisiblepages>
/pivotview>.

This set could be useful

views>
table>
defaultrowsdisplayed>200
/defaultrowsdisplayed>
defaultrowsdisplayedindelivery>250
/defaultrowsdisplayedindelivery>
defaultrowsdisplayedindownload>1250
/defaultrowsdisplayedindownoad>
/table>
/views>

Do you want to change the default skin, easy..

!– Default Styles –>
defaultstyle>Majendi
/defaultstyle>
defaultskin>Majendi
/defaultskin>

How giving more values in a drop down list
!– Prompts –>
prompts>
maxdropdownvalues>20000
/maxdropdownvalues>
/prompts>

Have a good look at the bookshelf and Service Requests in SupportWeb for many more examples. If you find any undocumented ones post them here, and I’ll put them in the book.