BusinessObjects Enterprise Administrator's Guide

What are program objects and instances?

A program object is an object in BusinessObjects Enterprise that represents an application. Publishing a program object to BusinessObjects Enterprise allows you to use BusinessObjects Enterprise to schedule and run the program object and to manage user rights in relation to the program object. For information about publishing program objects, see Overview.

When you publish a program object or its associated files to BusinessObjects Enterprise, they are stored in the Input File Repository Server (FRS). Each time a BusinessObjects Enterprise program runs, the program and files are passed to the Program Job Server, and BusinessObjects Enterprise creates a program instance. Unlike report instances, which you can view in their completed format, program instances exist as records in the object history. BusinessObjects Enterprise stores the program's standard out and standard error in a text output file. This file appears when you click a program instance in the object History.

Program types

Three types of applications can be published to BusinessObjects Enterprise as program objects:

• Executable

  Executable programs are binary files, batch files, or shell scripts. They generally have file extensions such as: .com, .exe, .bat, .sh. You can publish any executable program that can be run from the command line on the machine that runs the Program Job Server.

• Java

  You can publish any Java program to BusinessObjects Enterprise as a Java program object. For Java program objects to have access to Java SDK objects, your class must implement the IProgramBase interface from the BusinessObjects Enterprise Java SDK (com.businessobjects.sdk.plugin.desktop.program.IProgramBase). For details, see the BusinessObjects Enterprise Java SDK Guide.

• Script

  Script program objects are JScript and VBScript scripts. They are run on Windows using an embedded COM object and can—once published—reference the BusinessObjects Enterprise SDK objects. For details, see the BusinessObjects Enterprise COM SDK Guide.

  Note:    Script program objects are not supported on UNIX.

Note:    As the administrator, you can choose to enable or disable any of the types of program objects. For details, see Authentication and program objects.

Once you have published a program object to BusinessObjects Enterprise, you can configure it in the Objects management area of the CMC. For each type of program object (Executable, Java, or Script) you can choose to specify command-line arguments and a working directory. For executable and Java programs, there are additional ways, both required and optional, to configure the program objects and provide them with access to other files.

Tip:    Program objects allow you to write, publish, and schedule scripts or Java programs that run against BusinessObjects Enterprise, and perform maintenance tasks, such as deleting instances from the history. Furthermore, you can design these scripts and Java programs to access BusinessObjects Enterprise session information. This ensures that the scheduled program objects retain the security rights or restrictions of the user who scheduled the job. (Your scripts or java programs require access to the BusinessObjects Enterprise SDK. For details, see the BusinessObjects Enterprise COM SDK Guide or the BusinessObjects Enterprise Java SDK Guide.)