Oracle BI Publisher Blog

Hot off the presses ... 5.6.3 for EBS has hit metalink in the last half hour. Get in there and get it downloaded:

5472959 - XDO/ORACLE XML PUBLISHER OA ROLLUP PATCH 5.6.3

Just a few of the new features:

XML Publisher's Template Builder for Microsoft Word is now called Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Template Builder for Microsoft Word. This release includes a cross tabulation (cross tab) builder, XML schema support, and an enhanced chart builder. New chart types added are: Area, Ring, and 3D Bar. The Template Builder also now supports the application of styles to define the look and feel of your chart. Styles include: April, Autumn, Black and White, Comet, Confetti, Earth, Executive, Financial, Glass, Nautical, Projection, Regatta, Southwest.

XML Publisher provides a utility to facilitate the conversion of Oracle Reports (version 9i and later) to XML Publisher Reports. The conversion is a two-step process requiring a data model conversion and a layout conversion using the following new APIs:

DataTemplateGenerator API converts the Oracle Reports data model to an XML Publisher data template.

RTFTemplateGenerator API converts the Oracle Reports layout to an XML Publisher RTF template.

XML Publisher now supports the Text Direction feature of Microsoft Word that enables you to change the orientation of text in a table cell. You can rotate the text 90, 180, or 270 degrees. This is supported for RTF and PDF output.

Now in addition to the xsl:if statment, you can also use the "It...Then...Else" construct in RTF Templates to define conditional formatting.

The XML output data structure can be defined for a data template now when using REF CURSOR.

The following attributes have been added to handle XML data structures and scalability - include_parameters, include_null_element, xml_tag_case, db_fetch_size, scalable_mode, include_rowsettag, debug_mode

Plus many ( well not that many cos our folks write such good code) bug fixes ... more information can be gotten from the About Document Note 422508.1 on metalink.

I'll dig in a bit more next week ...