Oracle BI Publisher Blog

Bit of a long hiatus or holiday since my last post. I recently moved to a new position and have been playing catch up ever since. Im now caught up (kinda), you won't get 4/5 entries a week but at least 2 or 3 :0)

To get back into the groove, we're back looking at charts. Essentially a colleague was looking for something like this:

Does not look that special but in the accompanying email the OWN_NUMBER column is meant to be a 'house' image. You'll also notice its laying on top of another column. Let me say right now, I dont think the 'house' can be laid on top of the column. Getting a house into the chart is doable thou.

There is a caveat, the charting engine can embed an image into the chart but it will stretch it based on the data. So be wary about what images you are going to use.

To add the images you are going to have to get your hands a little dirty in the chart code. You will need to add a new element to the XML.

<SeriesItems defaultBorderTransparent="true" borderUsingDefaults="true">
<Series id="0" color="#33ccff">
<SFX fillType="FT_TEXTURE" textureURL="file:d:\temp\house1.gif" textureDisplayMode="TDM_STRETCHED"/>
</Series>
<Series id="1" color="#cc33cc">
<SFX fillType="FT_TEXTURE" textureURL="file:d:\temp\house2.gif" textureDisplayMode="TDM_STRETCHED"/>
</Series>
</SeriesItems>

The SeriesItems has a couple of attributes, should be understandable. You then need to provide 'Series' items for the number of columns per data set you want to plot.

The SFX element is the one that pulls the images in, notice the textureURL attribute, it holds the path to the image you want to embed. The textureDisplayMode can take the following values TDM_STRETCHED | TDM_TILED. Ignore the second - the same SFX element can be used to add a chart background and you can stretch or tile it. Tiling is not going to be relevant here.

The final output looks something like this:

Bit stretched but you get the idea, sample files here. This will work with just about all versions of Publisher and BIBeans.