How to increase Session Timeout in BI Publisher

Often you see the below warning message “You have been inactive for more than 16 minutes. Click Ok to keep your session” inside BI Publisher. This is due to you are idle in BI Publisher for more than 16 minutes and about to reach the BI Publisher session timeout of 20 minutes. Once you reached that 20 minutes, Bi Publisher automatically log you out. In case if you are running an ad-hoc report that takes more than 20 minutes will get discarded automatically.

 

 

We need to check the timeout setting in our BI Publisher before doing any modification, so I have covered two topics here:

 

1. Where to check the session timeout setting in BI Publisher?

2. How to increase BI Publisher Session Timeout?

 

1) Where to check the session timeout setting in BI Publisher ( XMLPSERVER )?

 

1.1) You need to a valid open session to check the session timeout setting so Login into BI Publisher and keep it aside

 

 

1.2) Login into WebLogic Console, Deployments, Expand BI Publisher and click on the XMLPSERVER as shown below

 

 

1.3) Click on the Monitoring tab and click on the Sessions tab. You will find the session timeout in seconds in Max. Inactive Interval column. As shown below, The default BI Publisher session timeout is 1200 seconds (20 minutes)

 

 

2. How to increase the BI Publisher Session Timeout

 

From the above step, we can understand that we need to configure session timeout in XMLPSERVER. XMLPSERVER is a java web archive file like a zip file which resides under a Java enterprise archive called BIpublisher. Look at STEP 1.2, XMLPSERVER is under BIPUBLISHER. We need to increase the session timeout in a file web.xml that present under xmlpserver.war that present under XMPserver.ear and redeploy the ear again. Ok, where is this ear file residing?

 

2.1) Shutdown the server: Go to WebLogic console, Click on Servers, Click on the tab Control tab, Select the BI Server and click Fore Shutdown ad shown below

 

 

2.2) To find the xmlpserver.ear file: Click on the Deployments, click on the bipublisher (step 1.2) and find the path

 

 

2.3) Go to that directory and backup the file xmlpserver.ear. In case you do something wrong we can revert it back

 

 

2.4) Open a command prompt, Issue the following command to unzip the war file from ear file.

Note: You can use Linux unzip command instead of jar.exe

"c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_45\bin\jar.exe" xf xmlpserver.ear xmlpserver.war

 

 

2.5) Issue the following command to unzip the web.xml from the WAR file

 

"c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_45\bin\jar.exe" xf xmlpserver.war WEB-INF/web.xml

 

 

2.6) Edit the web.xml under the WEB-INF directory. Search for the session-timeout tag and increase the Timeout as shown below. Input a timeout in minutes

 

 

2.7) Use the following command to update the web.xml file back to the WAR file

 

"c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_45\bin\jar.exe" uf xmlpserver.war WEB-INF/web.xml

 

 

2.8) Update the WAR file back to the EAR file

 

"c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_45\bin\jar.exe" uf xmlpserver.ear xmlpserver.war

 

 

2.9) Log in to WebLogic console, Select the bipublisher and click Delete button to delete the deployment. Click Yes on the next screen.

 

 

 

2.10) Click on the Install button

 

 

2.11) Click on the Upload Your File

 

 

2.11) Upload the modified xmlpserver.ear file CLIck Next and Next again

 

 

2.13) Select the Install this deployment as an application and click next

 

 

2.14) While update, Make sure to select the cluster

 

 

2.15) Input bipublisher as a name and click Finish. Click on the button Activate Changes

 

2.16) Go to Deployment, Select the bipublisher and elect Servicing all requests

 

2.18) Start the BI Server & login to BI Publisher again to establish a session.

 

2.19) Login into WebLogic console, Deployments, Expand Bi Publisher, Click XMLPSERVER, Select Sessions under Monitoring. You will see your applied timeout value in Max. Inactive Interval

 

 

13. If you see on the below image, the session timeout increased to 1 hours