Opal User Guide

Contents of this Guide

Summary
Prerequisites
Using Command Line Tools

Starting Opal Console
Executing Commands on Opal Console

Excel Files
Reporting with BIRT

Summary

Opal consists of a command line tool, opal that allows sub-commands in a console to perform different tasks.

This guide provides a description of the opal command.

Prerequisites

On server side: a properly configured Opal distribution. See Opal Installation Guide and Opal Configuration Guide for details about it.

On client side: a SSH client with connection information (host, port). On Windows, PuTTY SSH client is recommended.

Using Command Line Tools

Starting Opal Console

You have to be authenticated to perform commands on Opal. See with your administrator to get a user name and password.

Using PuTTY, enter the following session information: Opal server host, port and select connection type SSH.

On linux, use ssh client in a terminal:

ssh <username>@<hostname> -p <port>

Executing Commands on Opal Console

Once in the console, see Opal Commands for a description of the commands and Opal Commands Cookbook for Opal good practices and practical solutions.

Excel Files

Note that Opal supports both Excel 97 and Excel 2007 formats. When specifying an output file, Opal will choose which format to use through the extension of the filename specified:

Extension	Format used	Limits
`.xls`	Excel 97	256 columns and 64K lines
`.xlsx`	Excel 2007	16K columns and 1M lines

Be aware that the Excel 97 format only supports 256 columns. This limits the size of the tables that can be written to these files. Simply specify an .xlsx to support writing large tables (up to 16 000 columns).

Reporting with BIRT

Using a tool like BIRT, simple and complex reports may be created.

You can found example of BIRT usage with Opal here. This is not part of the Opal official release.