Oracle BI Publisher Blog

What is XML How can I leverage the technology in my organization Real world example of XML solutions for PeopleSoft Enterprise Examples of organizations that conform to XML standards The future of XML standards

Standard reports are used to support key business processes and are particularly suitable for large transaction reporting.

With standard functionality, the output for these reports is delivered in Courier font, and is difficult to read. If users wish to use the information for presentations, the report can be saved as a text file, imported into Excel.

Oracle xml publisher is a template based publishing solution that has been available since 11.5.9. Aimed at functional users, it integrates the functionality of word-processing tools with existing E-Business Suite Reporting, without the need for technical assistance from Developers.

The collection of data is still managed by the E-Business module, but at run-time, xml publisher merges the report data with your designed template, utilizing fonts, color, images, charts, headers and footers and delivering them in PDF, HTML, Excel formats, as well as being able to populate pre-formatted 3rd party PDF forms (such as 1099 and W2).

The presentation will cover the xml publisher tool, simple examples of formatting output, conditional formatting, as well as establishing some Best Practices for using the tool.

xml publisher from Drab to FAB!

Executive Summary Communications between companies is critical so that commerce may occur smoothly and effectively. Any delay in the delivery of information may seriously affect the ability of a company to complete the manufacture, assembly, or shipment of its product or service. Delays impact profitability. Therefore, it is important for every organization to evaluate its communications methods, improve speed and accuracy, and most of all, reduce or eliminate costs along the way.

Business documents tend to be well-defined (such as purchase orders, invoices, statements, packing slips), printed and distributed to the intended recipient. Some companies cling to the use of printing these documents on pre-printed, multi-part forms. More progressive companies have purchased 吐orms packages,? replacing the pre-printed form with an electronic form which distributes to several printers dispersed throughout the company infrastructure.

Unfortunately, many companies overlook automating business communications by ignoring ways to improve the delivery of these critical business documents. They continue to use postal delivery, courier delivery, or manual faxing. All three of these methods include wasted material costs, human intervention, and delivery costs. Fortunately, this pain may be significantly reduced or completely eliminated by using an automated document delivery solution.

In late 2004, Oracle Corporation introduced xml publisher (hereafter referred to as XMLP) available on Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) 11i. XMLP effectively eliminates the purchase of other third-party tools to create electronic forms. Standard tools like Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word may be used to create a form, and tokens? place data (such as the company, address, PO number, line items, etc.) from the Oracle database directly onto the form. The tokens are defined using an XML data stream. Additionally, XMLP touts the ability to deliver documents via fax and email. By using common applications to simplify forms creation and offering a delivery mechanism, XMLP greatly improves the efficiency of the document delivery process.

This paper is intended to educate users, developers, managers, and executives of companies using Oracle EBS to maintain and distribute critical business documents with a third-party automated document delivery solution.

Executive Summary:

Oracle has a strong commitment to xml publisher. It is now part of Oracle Business Intelligence suite and has been renamed to Oracle BI Publisher. As per Oracle, Release 12i of eBusiness Suite has almost 80% of the reports that are XML based. They encourage organizations to adopt this technology from now on, since this is 禅he tool of the future?. One of the biggest strength of xml publisher is the output formatting. It solves a huge problem of laying out the reports that was there with traditional reporting tools.

As a result of this, there has recently been a lot of focus by Oracle customers, on how to develop reports in xml publisher. They are trying to find out what is required for them to convert existing reports to xml publisher and how to develop new reports. They also want to know how to modify Seeded Oracle Reports (which are all in xml publisher in Release 12i onwards). This being a new tool, customers are still busy learning the tool itself. They are not yet emphasizing on learning the back end of this technology.

Oracle has developed wizard like interfaces to manage the report development using this tool. Wizards are very good to use but at times it helps to know what happens behind the wizard痴 interface. Having that knowledge makes the developer even more productive as there are always certain things that are harder to do via a wizard and in some cases impossible. Having this extra knowledge is like having a full control of the development environment as well as enormous flexibility and customization potential

This presentation will give you details about behind the scenes of xml publisher. To understand the nitty gritties of the tool would be beneficial to all - the database and system administrator as well as the developer. This would facilitate a smooth report development and deployment if both the DBA and the developer understand the entire process and the terminology each one is using. This presentation will provide both the parties with a complete understanding of this tool by providing them with the following:

1) What happens in the system when the xml publisher patch is installed? 2) What happens when a template is loaded? 3) What XML is generated when they create a template? 4) Where are templates stored? 5) How are templates linked to concurrent programs? 6) What tools does Oracle provide to transfer the templates from instance to another without having to do it manually? 7) How XSL-FO is used to format the report layout.

And much more.