Our marketing and I would have you believe that XML Publisher can empower your end users to build their own layouts and for the majority of your reports I still think thats true; creating listing reports with sub totals, re-grouping and page breaks are well within the capability (after a little training) of all but the most ardent technophobe. But when it comes to more complicated documents, usually the customer facing types, invoices, purchase orders, etc they very quickly need to get into some more advanced features which the template builder does not yet support and IT needs to step in. But IT does not need to do it all and revert to the slow report development seen before the advent of XMLP.
Another great tip from Serge in EMEA consulting came out at last weeks training event. Give the user a blank MSWord document and one formfield ... now ask them to design the complete layout of a report use the formfield to position the data and put in some sample data into the fields and even go as far as formatting them i.e. date, string or number. Then have them mark up the document with the look and feel they want, logos, colors, etc. If they think an invoice is going to stretch across multiple pages have them design the second and possible subsequent pages. Once they are happy with it, get them to sign off on it, you can then enable the template putting required data tags and for-each structures. Before handing back to the user for testing with some sample data Serge goes as far as to hide the form fields that contain the logic for the report from the user. This is simple enough, just mark the control fields and then set the font to hidden, you can use the ¶ to show/hide the fields. If the user needs to move data about, they can without getting worried about 'breaking' the report. Word of caution here thou, they could move things around just that little too far.
So even on the tougher templates the end user can still be involved in the design and get what their users want in the output and get that report out and into production much faster <:o)
