Oracle BI Publisher Blog

I spent the morning in Las Vegas today at the Oracle HCM User group conference. Its build build build in Las Vegas ... everytime I come here there is some new palace being built for us to play in. Still traffic is still not too bad, well compared to the Bay Area anyway and the conference was 10 minutes from the airport.

XML Publisher was headlining in the main conference hall and we had about 400 folks turn up to listen to what this relatively new tool that they have been hearing about here all week is all about. Sadly due to some technical issues we could not do any demos so there was a lot of 'imagining' going on in peoples minds.

The first half of the presentation was all about XMLP's capabilities ... it does so much, an hour does not do it justice. If you think how much time you spend configuring and developing for multiple reporting solutions and here you have one that does it all ... less effort to develop, less to maintain and you get happier users to boot.

The second half of the presentation Vipin from the EBS HRMS team showed off what they are doing with XMLP in the HRMS product. I checked their templates, they are now shipping about 70 for their customers to use ranging from W-2's for the US to the Finnish Paylist Audit Report and that number is growing rapidly with each release.
I think the biggest benefit their customers are going to see is the ability to update these layouts to their own tastes plus localizing templates for specific countries is going to a relative snap!
The product team are also seeing benefits as can customers in the ability to consolidate datasources, many of their report extracts have been consolidated, easier for them to build, maintain and test.

After the main session we followed up with a round table 'Meet the Experts' there were about 50 folks present with questions ranging from how do I get started to how does the concurrent manager work under the covers to how can I extend the HRMS extracts to get the data  I want to how do I burst reports to ten thousand retail outlets on a daily basis ... tough questions to answer without being able to show people a demo ... pictures really do speak a thousand words.  If you're looking for more info, check out the our homepage on OTN or search for "About XML Publisher" on metalink and check out the docs there.

Gotta go, I think I see another casino sprouting on the runway at the airport ...

So, Collaborate 06 starts next week, a coming together of the Independent ORacle Users Group (IOUG), Qwest (the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards user groups and the Oracle Applications User Group ... its going to be big, organizers are expecting over 5000 attendees with 450+ sessions and a packed exhibit hall.

They'll be plenty of opportunity to learn more about XMLP, there are several customer sessions, an XMLP panel, our main session (lots of demos planned) and even a hands on session.

Transform Your Standard Reports ? GO the XML Way!
04/26/2006 9:15AM -10:15AM RAD-BELLEVUE

The City of West Palm Beach uses XML Publisher as Oracle痴 integrated solution for its reporting needs, eliminating third-party software at no additional costs. So can you! We utilize Microsoft Word to design templates and Oracle Apps to integrate and print documents viz., W2s, 1099s, payroll checks and other standard reports. Attendees will learn how to transform boring reports into dazzling outputs. This presentation includes a brief introduction to XML and how you, too, can benefit from this technology to address your document needs. We share how to create free form and table layouts using the template builder and other formatting tips

XML Publisher Live! ? With All the Bells and Whistles
04/26/2006 10:30AM -11:30AM GOVERNORS BR D

We would like to share our experiences implementing Oracle XML Publisher successfully at Iron Age (retail business) for the customer facing documents like invoices, pick slips, pack slips, AP checks and purchase orders. Like any other new software product, we have gone through a lot of challenges to make this work. There were issues at patching, right version of client plug-ins, Barcoding, MICR character alignment, pagination for invoices and finally just understanding the kinks of the tool. With a few caveats, we can finally say that the business users can now design their own customer facing documents.

Building Templates Using XML Publisher and Publish Business Documents
04/27/2006 9:45AM -12:00PM PRESIDENTIAL BR D

Build report templates using Oracle XML Publisher and deliver the formatted reports to end users by fax, e-mail and print. Find how you can eliminate pre-printed forms for POs, invoices, checks, pick slips, 1099, etc. Learn what is coming ahead and how you can extend the value of your Oracle Apps.

Delivery of XML Publisher Formatted Reports
04/25/2006 9:45AM -10:45AM JACKSON CD

Oracle XML Publisher (XMLP) provides yet another option to format reports for the Oracle end users. What options do Oracle customers have to deliver the XMLP formatted reports? Does XMLP work for businesses of all sizes? Does it solve all formatting problems? This panel will discuss challenges and what is ahead.

Oracle XML Publisher: Enterprise Reporting and Delivery Platform
04/25/2006 3:30PM -4:30PM JACKSON EF

Oracle XML Publisher offers an efficient, scalable reporting solution for complex, distributed environments. Its central architecture generates and delivers information to employees, customers and suppliers ? securely and in the right format ? allowing users to create and maintain their own report formats from data extracts supplied by multiple sources.

We're also down on the Oracle demogrounds so if you're coming to Nashville drop by and say howdy!

Collaborate06 has started with a bang ... this hotel is huge, just to give you an idea how big ... they have a river running through the grounds of the hotel (all of which are under glass) and you can ride a boat and get a half hour guided tour of the hotel. The fish are huge, wish I had brought my rod!

Monday is pretty much given over to Special Interest Groups during the day. This evening the exhibition floor opened to floods of attendees with burning questions. We have an Applications Technology pod staffed by yours truly and a few other brave souls. It was pretty busy ... not OpenWorld busy but busy enough.

Adding External Data

I got a request tonight; 'How can I bring other data into the layout that is not in the datasource provided?' ... there are a couple of ways to do this. Now Im not going to tell you how to execute a query from the template to pull in more data from the db ... that starts to tie the template to the data extract too closely and we go down a path we do not want to go ... that said its possible but we're not recommending it. If you have some static data or can call a URL to pull XML data; maybe a servlet or static XML document then you can easily integrate this into you output.

There is a function in XSL called document(), we can use this to pull XML data into the template very easily. Basically we declare the function at the top of the template. For this example lets use a well known RSS news feed.

<xsl:variable name="news" select="document('http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories')"/>

We create a variable, 'news'  and assign the RSS feed results to it using the document function. The variable will contain a nodeset or tree of data not just a single element.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
 <rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss">
 <channel>
 <title>Yahoo! News: Top Stories</title>
 <copyright>Copyright (c) 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.</copyright>
 <link>http://news.yahoo.com/i/716</link>
 <description>Top Stories</description>
 <language>en-us</language>
 <lastBuildDate>Tue, 25 Apr 2006 06:18:26 GMT</lastBuildDate>
 <ttl>5</ttl> 
 <image> <title>Yahoo! News</title>
 ...

We can now reference the "news" variable and its contents in the template.

The image shows a portion of a template using the "news" variable.

FE - <?for-each:$news/*?> - this is pulling the complete nodeset into the for-each loop
Channel Link - <?/rss/channel/title?> simply referencing the title element
Link - this is a piece of text i.e. 'Link' with an MSWord hyperlink layered over the top,{/rss/channel/link}  - I'll cover the whole notion of links and dynamic links in another post.
FE - <?for-each:item?> - now we start looping over the news item data just as we would normally.
The rest you can check out yourselves, the template is posted here. When you test remember you may need to set a proxy to get out of your firewall.

So pretty simple huh? Of course you can get a lot more imaginative, say your XML source accepted parameters you could pass parameter values based on the main data set, you can build dynamic URLs to open another report, even a self service web page or an Oracle Form or anything else for that matter.
Busy day tomorrow with panels, presentations and the demogrounds ... see ya!

Its Wednesday ... the exhibition hall is winding down and I have not stopped talking for 3 straight days. The three OAUG sessions I have attended so far have been standing room only ... there were folks sitting on the floor in the ailses ... crazy.
I joined an XMLP panel discussion on Tuesday chaired by Kris from Sirvisetti, lots of questions and Im pleased to say we had the anwsers that tee'ed up the main XMLP session from me. Another heaving room full to the rafters and then some ... very small projection screen meant a lot of squinting from the back ... we covered a lot of ground in an hour showing some of the new features in the latest release for Apps ... demos galore ... some more sucessful than others :o)

The best sessions so far for me were today:
Transform your standard reports - Go the XML way!
This morning Neida and Josephine from the City of West Palm Beach took folks through their experience implementing first, some simpler HR reports and then tackling the Payroll check print! I think there were a few hiccups along the way but they are now live and their users want more more more! Awesome presntation. You can get a copy of their presentation here.

XML Publisher Live! - With all the bells and whistles
Sridhar from Apps Associates followed up with a presentation on the XMLP implementation he was involved in at Iron Age, a workplace footwear company. They had some tough requirements for their customer facing documents, decided to go with XMLP and have now been live for about 8 months and everything is running smoothly. You can get Sridhar's presentation here. 

Both presentations provided some great tips and tricks for building templates and also putting together a plan of action for implementing XMLP. All this was fantastic for me, these were Oracle customers using Oracle technology to address a tough problem and they got to see just how they could get started and implement XML Publisher and start saving time, effort and money.

The demo pod has been busy since we opened on Monday night, a constant stream of folks looking for answers and demos of the Apps and standalone release. Tomorrow there is an all morning session on XMLP, Building Templates Using XML Publisher and Publish Business Document this is going to be run by Kris again ... he's nearly as busy as me! 

Well, Im back from a long  long road trip to Colorado from California, nearly 2800 miles through some of the most boring and most spectacular scenery the US has to offer ... the two extremes strangely enough in the same state, Utah.
On the way out driving through mile after mile of searing hot salt flat. I dont know how I stayed awake having driven through the night to get through Nevada (sorry Nevadans I'm sure it was beautiful out there in the dark).

on the way there ... mile after mile of salt

on the way back ... mile after mile of breathtaking scenery

              http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/xml-publisher/index.html

There is lots of new content available on all flavors of XMLP plus all the documentation you could ever want and even a download for the Enterprise edition that takes just a click, not 10 ... enjoy!

Its coming ... its even bigger I hear rumors of Oracle taking over a block of Howard Street in San Francisco to "extend" the Moscone Center for the week :o)
This year there will be two XMLP events for EBS and PeopleSoft customers at the Extreme Weekend - lots of hands on stuff to dip your proverbial toes in the XMLP water. Places are limited so book early.
There are also over 20 sessions related to XMLP and its use throughout the all of Oracle including EBS, JDE, PeopleSoft and Enterprise. The sessions are not just from development, we have customer and a partner sessions lined up. Last year they were turning folks away from the doors so get there early too.
Of course the demo pod will be swamped all week but drop by, hang out, have a chat and get a demo or three!

The above sessions are of course subject to some change but you get the idea.

Its coming, that crazy week (for me anyway)  and although crazy its one of the most enjoyable weeks of my working year - I get to meet and talk to as many of you as possible. We'll be down on the demogrounds throughout the week and I think we'll have demopods for EBS, PS, JDE and the Enterprise release - of course you'll get to see publisher all over the place.

Here's whats in the session catalog so far that relates to Publisher.

There are some great looking customer sessions from WGI and Hologic and of course sessions from the teams responsible for the publisher flavors. There are other sessions that will mention the use of publisher and look out for the session on the 'Report Repository' I mentioned last week.

See you there I hope - drop by the demopods for a chin wag.

Today is blog action day - so I read this morning. Its a call to arms for all bloggers to write about a single subject - the environment, quelle surprise!

Im certainly not an 'environmental sceptic' - I majored in Environmental Science back in the UK - this was not a 'town planning' degree - this was hard core, nuclear physics, environmental chemistry - 3 branches, microbiology and an awful lot of math (not quite sure why.) So, I think Im reasonably well versed in all things environment - we do our bit here in our piece of Colorado with recyling and the like. We even signed up for solar panels which I hope are going to come some time next year - I can not wait to see that electricity meter go into reverse!

Here comes the flameworthy retoric. I do take everything that a certain peace prize winning politician says and does with a pinch of salt - yes, the world is warming, I dont think you can ignore that. But some of the 'scare tactics' used are worthy of MCCarthy and his 'reds under the bed'. Yes, America needs to wake up - the $1 gallon has gone and running vehicles that get 12 mpg is madness if not for the environment then for your pocket at least.

But car manufacturers need to wake up too - a Volkswagen in Europe that maybe has a 1.1 liter engine and gets 40 mpg miraculously turns up over here sporting a 2.0L turbo - why? To cater for the American thirst for power? The roads here are almost as bad as the UK for congestion, why have all that power? We'll be measuring performance using the 0-30mph yardstick soon because 60 is a distant memeory on our roads. The weather dude this morning was pointing out that the fog was lifting over Denver, hmm the brown hydrocarbon laden smog appeared to be doggedly hanging on and was doing a great job of obscuring the Rockies - the mountains that is.

What am I getting at - the great American obsession with cars? Maybe ... You can have the best light rail systems in the country but if folks still want to sit in their own metal boxes, sipping coffee, spewing fumes, it aint worth it. Re-education is the key, not scare mongering.

Thats it - I have made comment on the environment, I could go on, but I wont - you're relieved I can tell. The only tenuous link back to BIP that I can come up with is that Mike, our PM owns a Prius!

A few weeks back I made a call for templates for a demo of the new Reports Repository demo at OpenWorld. As I mentioned this is going to be a repository for us and hopefully you to share your templates with the Publisher community at large. I got a few templates but I'd love to get more.

Doug Fortnam at Protege Software Services contacted me with a great example of a sharable template - its not for an invoice report but actually a custom report but its very useful. I'll share his insights here.

This XML Publisher Report is a report to document any Forms Personalizations present in Oracle Apps 11.5.10. I presented it at the New England OAUG in Massachusetts in June of this year. I think it is a good example of a useful, shareable template because it documents the setup of Forms Personalizations, either select Personalizations or all Personalizations in the database. The sql query to generate the flat file was developed in TOAD and then used in the Report Wizard to create the data template. This example makes extensive use of re-grouping and conditional logic to display the data in a fashion similar to what is displayed in the Oracle Forms. If I had to do it over again, I would develop a data template with grouping to simplify the rtf template. Not sure if there is a performance hit because of all the re-grouping.

Doug shared the template and you can get it here.

I have been looking at the blog stats over the last 6 months - it's funny, Mon-Thurs numbers are huge, well Im happy with them. According to the stat counter on the site, this blog is getting between 2-5000 hits a day. Thats not bad in my opinion, for a product that is not that 'big' and a blog that is technical in nature - it's not often that you will get a 'world according to Dexter' diatribe here.  So Mon-Thurs are great, Friday is a sloooow day - we halve our numbers most weeks. I guess I lose you folks in the Asian contingent from the readership if I post too late in the day. Hence, you may have noticed that Friday posts are light on the ground or are a little 'fluffy' in nature - not that Im chasing hits and only want to write when I know Im going to be read. Far from it - I view the blog as a resource that you folks can use - it gets news out there, it supplements the official documentation and is fun to write ... most of the time.

I have received several emails recently thanking me for the content and how it helps - that is great, thats exactly what I wanted the blog to be. Now, I want to get more content thats useful to you out there. Sometimes I indulge myself and will write up some demo project I have been working on - for instance, not many of you will be interested in the data entry via PDF series I wrote up a while back - whereas the recent 'Where's my Total' set of posts got me loads of feedback.

With that in mind you will see two new 'departments' on the blog - 'Newbies' and 'Hints and Tips'.  You can probably guess whats going to be in those two - but I would also like to get some inputs from you dear reader. What topics would be useful to you? Are you a newbie and need newbie stuff? or are you more experienced and want push the boundaries of the product and need some help?

I guess we have readers across the board but I want to hear from you, thats an order people get commenting or mailing!

I have an admission to make - may be you have noticed, I have not been on the forum recently. I have been drowning in mail, demo and ppt prep for OOW ... apologies!

I took a look yesterday and jumped back in - have to admit I thought there might be a few zero reply threads but to my suprise and pleasure there were very few. There are still questions flooding in but folks are 'giving back' on the forum and answering a few questions with their wisdom. A big thank you from me and team and a pat on the back.

For those of you that do not know about it or have not used it - just post a question and you'll get an answer. Those of you inside the Oracle org - get out, its not for you, you have a mailing list to ask questions :o)

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=245

Its dominated by EBS and standalone users but I want you JDE and PS folks getting in there - I'll help out as much as possible and Im happy to ping JDE and PS dev teams for answers on your behalf.

I'm now back on the horse and will endeavour to get at least a 1/2 hour on the forum a day again to help out. 

Us Oracle bloggers have been at it about OOW for some time now ... Im seeing a backlash from those that can not make it asking us to stop. It's the one week a year a year we get to talk to you folks directly so its a little understandable the Oracle blogosphere is awash with talk of OOW.

I have covered sessions on BIP in a past post, today Im bigging up the OAUG XML Publisher SIG, note the old school name - its an early start but should be worth it.

Abhishek who runs the SIG sent me a tentative agenda a few weeks back:

User Presentation - Using BI Publisher for outbound Interface - 45 minutes

Town Hall Discussion on BI Publisher - 1 hour

It's squarely aimed at EBS customers and OAUG are recommending pre-booking a psot - Im not sure on the numbers for the SIG but our EBS session on Tuesday is already full - we're trying to get a bigger room, fingers crossed! There is a more generic BI SIG where standalone and BIEE folks can get more info:

Session ID:
Session Title: Oracle BI SIG
Date: Sunday 11th November - 2:45 PM - 3:45 PM
Room: Moscone West 2014 - L2

Not sure on the content of this SIG - will try and find out.

Mark Rittman is over next week and running the ODTUG BI&DW SIG on Sunday at 11am,  Moscone West 3010 & 3012 - more info from Mark here.

My plane gets in at 7.45 on Sunday so I might be a little late but would not miss it for the world - hope to see you there, if you cant Im sorry but you'll get to see pictures and a quick report on Sunday afternoon - my new cell phone is my new best blog friend.

Final update for OOW for the week - earlier this week we were filling the XMLP for EBS session room with pre-booked folks. By yesterday we had nearly 50 people wait listed to get it. The great logistics folks have gotten us a bigger room.

Couple of doors down from the old room and bigger - get a reservation quick to guarantee a seat or a square foot of floor space.

Whats going on in the session?

Well, all I have is about 30 slides and thats it!
We have demos galore from bursting to the reports repository, I have folks talking about their implementations, I have some Oracle Partners talking about their solutions and you got my dulcet tones to keep you interested and to make a change I have questions for you all - should be fun!

Get to the Schedule Builder here and get a spot.

Quick Update  

Pradeep from out PM team has pulled out a list of 5 sessions that cover BIP/XMLP from a customers perstepctive - try and get to some of them and get the real skinny on BIP/XMLP

It was great to see 60 or so bleary eyed bippers arrive for the OAUG XMLP SIG hosted by Abhishek. It was good session with a ppt on outbound electronic documents using eText templates then followed with Town Hall syle Q&A. Last count I have 14 action items ... its gonna be a long week.

Just a quick wrap up on Sunday - this morning we had the XMLP SIG run by Abhishek for OAUG - its funny there were more folks in the room that the picture would have you believe ... honest!

I thought it was a good session folks got the chance to vent and ask questions - its great to see so many people either live or going live with Publisher and now starting to ask 'OK, so what can I do with it next' - bursting is going to be a major thang for many of you I think - its certainly got peoples ears princked when it was mentioned this morning - the other biggy was 'hardware' secured check printing - we have a soft solution but many of you already have a DIMM card in your printer and want us to talk to it. Eric from Evergreen Data Systems got the chance to step to the plate on that one this morning. Evergreen are an Oracle  partner and have just such a 'hard' check solution and they have now got it working with Publisher under the concurrent manager. If you are looking to implement check printing from scratch check them and their solution out - they have a booth down on the exhibition floor - look out for them.

I know there are folks out there that already have the hardware purchased - they just need to be able to 'talk' to it via Publisher - those of you in the room this morning at least got a nod from our man at the top that we would take a look into it. Because we do not generate the PCL output ourselves its going to be a limited solution but we might be able to look at doing something for you in the near future. I'd appreciate any comments on this and requirements.

Anyhoo, I seemed to have come out of the meeting with about 15 action items to investigate - not quite sure how that happened. I just attract work I guess :o)

This afternoon was spent trying to get the demogrounds together - we have 3 dedicated Publisher pods this year - 2 standalone and an EBS one - Im still a die hard EBS fan at heart so you'll see me mostly hanging out at the EBS pod willing to wax lyrical all day or until my voice gives up to anyone that will listen. For those of you with a PeopleSoft or JDE 'bent' - there are pods for you too in your respective areas.

This evening was spent with the folks from Hologic and Washington Group International(WGI) - Glenn from Hologic will be presenting a good foundation guide to Publisher from a customers persepctive on Thursday 10-11am Moscone West 3014 - if you want an intro with the chance to quiz someone who's gonna tell you how it is get to the session - Im gonna bust a gut to be there. Rich and Ray from WGI hail from my new 'neck of the woods' in deepest darkest Colorado - they have been doing some visionary stuff with SOA in their company and Publisher provides the reporting and document generation component and integrates into their master document processing plan. They will really get under the covers of Publisher and down to the nitty gritty of BIP APIs on Wednesday 4.30-5.30pm Moscone West 3024 - should be a great technical session, join them to see how they put publisher (and us) through its paces. If nothing else come and ask Rich just what WGI does - its amazing - check out his podcast with Cliff last year.  

Met far too many folks today who, when introduced said 'Who? Tim ... the Tim Dexter from the blog?'
Yep I'm the man with no face until you meet me that is. To rectify this and prevent more disappointment when you see me in the flesh as it were ... here's a great picture taken tonight. Understand dear reader, I have been awake for nearly 24 hours, I'm dog tired and I'm grumpy ... be afraid, very afraid!

Down on the demo grounds this morning ... a slow start but boy did it get going. We are right next to the concourse - not buried at the back like last year so there were lots of folks coming by. Im very impressed by what some of you are getting up to with publisher - you have moved on from getting that invoice listing out and are now attacking the bursting engine with a vengeance. I heard today of a customer, sorry I can not remember your name, doing 'double bursting' - burst once and then take the results and burst those again - I did not catch the business problem we were solving but solving it we were and thats what matters. So bursting is hot - just about every one I spoke to wanted to know how to burst-  other than to drink 3 gallons of water and see if you can hang on!

For the initiated, bursting is a term used to describe the taking of a set of batch data, splitting them in to individual documents and then delivering them to recipients. A good example was quoted at the SIG yesterday - a company generates commission statements for all of its sales force every month. Rather than run 100s of individual reports, just run one for all of the sales force and then burst each report to the appropriate employee - simple n'est-ce pas? Thanks Jean Pierre - my 20 year old French is more than a little rusty :)

Publisher offers a little more, what if each employee had a delivery preference, or some wanted HTML while others PDF? what if some wanted it formatted using Layout A and others Layout B? Publisher can do that - as long as those values around layout, format and delivery option are available at run time then the bursting engine will dynamically apply templates, format layouts and deliver according to preferences.

We go a stage further thou, for real low level control, at each stage of the burst e.g. data split, format, generate, etc we have created a 'listener' - you can subscribe to any listener in your own code so that as a stage is reached in the burst you can interrupt the flow, step in, execute some logic and then let the burst continue. Let's say you wanted a copy of each document sent to your content management system - in the case of partner documents such as invoice, you can not just dump the documents into the repository, you need to add some attributes to it so that its searchable later on. Use the listener functionality - subscribe to the 'generate' event - once the document has been generated, get a copy of it and its XML data - now parse out what you need from the XML data and create your meta data file - now push this into your content manager et voila. The customer gets their invoice and you get an indexed copy of it for retrieval and record if needed later.

There are versions of bursting for EBS, PS and Standalone and I believe JDE will deliver a solution next year.

Go forth and burst! 

Joe and Elise got the word out on RR and Web2.0 today with a great session. A good session that was nearly full - check out the presentation via content builder. RR coming soon ... Go Ariens!

Last day today and I have really enjoyed meeting many many of you Bippers. I'm really pleased to see so many folks either now implementing or live and generating documents.

Many of you are embracing the 'publisher' way of reporting.
I spoke to someon yesterday about how they are using publisher. Reporting requirements are reasonably straightforward so he has designed a set of materialized views with 200 or so columns in them. Then built simple 'select * from' extracts and turned the business community loose with the template builder. His development team are not responsible for layouts any more and extract maintenance is a relative doddle ... fantastic stuff.

This approach is not going to work for everyone of course but its a great example of how publisher cab help you rethink your reporting approach. Making the business happy and gving then what they want and making ITs life easier.

The level of sophistication that I'm seeing some you using publisher for is amazing. Double bursting, BPEL integration, document routing, the list goes on and on - we need you folks presenting next year or at OAUG. On Tuesday I had a slide on data entry, since then I have had at least 3 conversations around 'how can we get it done'

It has not been EBS and standalone all week either I have spoken to many PeopleSoft and a few JDE customers. This is where I have to lean on the likes of Mikhail and Jody from the PS tools team for help and they have stepped up. I think thy have had a busy week on their pod and Jody is presenting this morning, so be sure to get along.

So, I'm happy with you people - its a long and winding road I know but you're doing great. I hope we measure up half as well as I think you do. On that not I bid you adieu from OOW07 ... normal service will resume tomorrow.

My work at OOW is done for another year ... well once I have sorted through the mass of ToDo's and questions on the back of business cards I'll be done.

We have been discussing hosting a weekly or bi-weekly Customer Web Session - we wnt to interact with you folks, get feedback on upcoming features, how-to's, template clinics, etc. We would do a couple of sessions in the day to pick up Europe, APAC and Americas so we are not talking a US centric thang ... gotta remember my roots and the worldwide coverage we have and I know the blog has. So an hour every week or two to learn something new or see a potential new feature.
I would really appreciate hearing from you on this - would you come?

A little off topic today but having watched and read about the AppsLab entry today on Human Computation and CAPTCHAS I thought the following might amuse you. How many of you can make head or tail of the following text?

2 out the 4 members of my family can read it, can you? Without too much effort that is?

... well sort of ... I had great plans of spending spare time over the holidaze writing articles. Sadly, it all fell apart, our family has been ravaged by strep throat, 'tummy bugs' - a technical term from my wife and flu. I thought I was going to avoid it all, I normally have a stomach and throat of steel. But alas Im still fighting of the last (I hope) of a bout of flu ... I have never ached so much in my life. Im breaking my fingers back in with some gentle typing ...  

Just to get on the blog bandwagon ... here are the top posts of last year

Update :- after a comment from Oliver on the huge list ie 50 articles from 52 weeks I need to clarify the list. As you know, for the most part this blog is not about such fluffy things as 'what I had for breakfast this morning' - its about good useful content that I hope you can use/reference when working with BIP. So I thought I would list some of the more populare articles of the more than 200 I have written.

These 50 are the top viewed articles of 2007 not all from 2007 - apologies for any confusion. Also added some explanation where needed as to what the hell I was writing about.

Delivery of documents is still high in most folks' minds - we need to do something about that! 

Not normally a blog for this type of thing but what the heck ... yesterday I got an email, like some poison chain letter, OK maybe not that bad. I have been blog tagged by Floyd over at JPL. I have yet to meet the great man - I caught him hanging out at the back of my session at OOW but could not get through all folks at the end to catch him. He'll be at OAUG in Denver later in the spring when maybe the snow will have gone and its my mission to share a bevvy or three with him. I have seen a couple of these tag thangs pass me by in recent months and both times it was a relief to pass under the radar. My sincerest thanks go to Jake for kicking off the latest round - this is a slight variation which is a little more fun - 8 things you never knew about me and then add 8 more victims, sorry willing participants to become 'it'.

You see in dear ol'Blighty we dont call it 'tag' we call it 'it' - sounds far more nasty and mean for your average 10 year old in the UK 'you're IT' At least we used to call it 'it', as Americanism sweeps the world maybe UK kids 'tag' each other and I dont mean with spray cans although that may be case now too ... the UK is going to the dogs to coin a phrase. Every time I get to go back I am more amazed - maybe its my new found American 'prudism' but full frontal nudity on the BBC and the ubiquitous F word - I was shocked the last time I was back.

Getting back on track, 8 things you never knew but always wanted to ask me ...

1. I used to be a beach bum - yes the UK has beaches and passable summers. In my youth, I spent warm summer daze teaching 'hot' young ladies to windsurf and on the not so warm, ripping 15ft waves in gale force winds going for barrel rolls to impress the 'hot' young ladies.

2. I flunked high school the first time round - see #1 then I woke up :0)

3. I used to have masses of hair ... honest! Before my two boys arrived I used to have a huge mop of hair - over the years it has all too rapidly run off and left me. My youngest (11) tells me I have a 'mushroom' on my head poking through the remaining strands. Rogaine is beckoning ... it may be too late ...

4. In a previous life I used to sell fine wine - after #2 I decided to see the world by sailing around it on yachts. Being young and restless and terrible with money I burned through it all in a few short months and found myself working for Oddbins in the UK selling wine and beers from all over the world. Good times, my shops takings growing massively year on year until the recession in the early nineties when my pampered 'Lloyds name' customers went from spending 500 GBP a month to almost nothing - tough times. I bailed and ...

5. Got my degree at 31 with 2 kids - yep, I got a second chance. My parents paid my mortgage for 4 years while I busted my chops getting a degree and working crappy jobs to make ends meet. Some of the happiest days of our lives I tell my wife, I think she agrees - hey, it beat the 100 hour weeks I was putting in at the wine shop. We're still together and I still worship the ground she walks on ...

6. I ride a Harley - after years of skateboarding to work when we lived in Foster City just next door to HQ we bought a house in the East Bay. Car pooling took its toll on my nearest and dearest. 'What I need is a motorbike dear', 'No tolls, no traffic - I'll be home in no time' - that was my opening gambit and it worked. I was gobsmacked to find myself sitting astride an HD DynaGlide with 1300cc of noisy great American motor throbbing between ... ahem ... moving on :0)

7. I talk too much - why use one word when twenty will make things far more interesting. Remember when you were told to ask 'open' questions of a potential recruit or to start conversations at parties. I have perfected answering the 'closed' question with at least a 5 minute diatribe, ask my colleagues, ask my customers, ask my wife and kids!

8. I love weather - being British I have a healthy interest in the weather. When we first moved to sunny NorCal in '99 a new friend assured me that I would get bored of the weather. Did he know how much it rained in the UK - California sunshine - gimme gimme gimme and damn the cost of sun lotion! I have to admit having now moved to Colorado, California weather is boring - its either sunny and warm (Apr-Nov) - bloody hot (for about 3 weeks in July) or torrentially wet (Dec-Mar.)
We have been here just over a year and boy is the weather interesting - we had snow in May, a glorious summer and we have seasons. Yes, the Aspens in our yard, now bare and skeletal will be bursting with vibrant green leaves by May and turning a fabulous gold and falling by November. I have home weather station where I have tracked temperatures as low as -20F (-29C) and as high as 100F (38C), seen 5 feet of snow fall in a day, hail as big as golf balls- been wrapped up in 4 layers with gloves and hat one day and be in shorts and a t shirt the next - I love this place.

Ok, thats my eight - hopefully a little interesting and next time you see me you have eight things to get me talking about plus anything and all  things 'Publisher'. Now for the next eight, sorry guys, at least you get a link from me ...

First up
Abhinav Agarwal - Mr BI, nuff said.
Gareth Roberts - from down under but the posh part
PeopleSoft Tipster - cos its not just EBS Publisher love we're sharing here
Joe Gum - of Finapps and Reports Repository fame
Dmitri Gielis- cos he writes a danged good APEX blog that I have gotten a lot from
Ike Wiggins - who writes a BIP blog and is on the forum a lot and who sent me masses of info on an easy JDev/BIP development set up and I have not passed it on yet for which I feel baaad and will rectify ASAP
Steve Meunch - for a great ADF blog and the kind of mind that came up with regrouping in XSL1.0
and last but certainly not least BIPGirl - she's mysterious but helping BIP noobs everywhere.

The BIP community is growing ... Im not alone blogging on BIP anymore. I have recently mentioned BIP Girl and she is writing some great articles on getting going with BIP but there are now others writing about their experiences with BIP ... some highlights.

BIPublisher and mySQL  - a mySQL post from Borkur on Be ICE

Creating my first report for BI Publisher in offline mode! - a great 'noobie' article on getting started with the template builder for Word

Understanding Architecture Changes from Oracle Reports to BI Publisher - a followup from Rajender on the BIP architecture.

My 1099-MISC Solution - BIP Girl covers how she used BIP to solve generating a 1099 tax report

XML Publisher Using Simple Java + XML + XSL - Neeraj covers an intro to the BIP APIs

BI Publisher: Common Use for Bursting API - Ike provides more insight to bursting

BI Publisher and nested tables and loops - Greg shares some of his experiences in building templates

Creating Applications using JDeveloper 11g and Web Service SOAP APIs - more API info from Venkatakrishnan

Email Distribution of Reports using BI Publisher and Discoverer - Meeester Rittman talks Disco - BIP integration

Thanks to all above and if you have a blog article you want to share let me know.

That lot should keep you BIP happy for a while, happy reading.

Do you tweet? If so, what about? Do you share the minutae of your life with the world via Twitter? If you have no idea what Im talking about, keeping reading,  I'll explain. Tweeting is the means by which you can send short, 140 chars of information into the ether - there folks can 'follow' your every move or maybe comment on 'why you might be late for work' or provide an opinion on your 'choice of breakfast' - I kid you not, people share that kind of stuff.
 
I have to admit I was completely unimpressed with 'tweeting' - Im sure people neither want to know nor care that 'Im going to the dentist' unless you enjoy some kind of voyeuristic experience 'watching' others. Now, if it could be used for some kind of business use then you have piqued my interest.

In steps Jake from Appslab - we have been exchanging emails recently on tweeting. I left a comment on one of his tweet blog postings recently expressing my 'unimpression' with it - yep Im a dinosaur. LAst Thursday, he posited an idea for tweeting that really got me thinking. The idea was to use twittering (the collective noun for tweets)  for questions, annoucements, tips and tricks. I and others of a BIP liked persuasion could tweet such content and those that were interested could quietly follow or contribute to the conversation. This had me hooked, if we could post information out there that folks could consume quickly and digest easily (140 chars remember so I cant waffle on like I am here) then we might be on to something.

The tweets are pushed out in one long stream, so how to find the BIP content in all the noise? Twitter does support the concept of you being able to 'follow' people so you could build up a loose knit group that could follow each other and tweet about BIP - but the casual reader would be lost in that stream of tweets, we need some way to tag the BIP messages.  Use 'eventtrack' says Jake - this little nugget of gold comes from as a side project from Craig at SAP, yes that SAP. It was developed to allow folks to register an event that everyone thats interested can tweet to. This opens up specific content to the casual reader via a browser or RSS. Cool!

So, after Jake ran it by Craig, I have setup a 'bippers' event - now this is not an event as such, we are abusing eventtrack a little to bring together the BIP community and allow us to share 'tagged' content that anyone can access for a longer term than a typical 'event.'

If you are tweeting already or are interested in starting and want to share read on. First you need to register with Twitter - very straightforward, everything you need can be found on their server at http://www.twitter.com - once you're signed up you can start tweeting to the web collective. You can do this in a mutitude of ways on your PC/laptop. The twitter site offers a page to send your messages or there is a mass of clients and plugins that you can install. Im currently using 'twhirl', you can even 'tweet' from your phone.
The next step is to enable the 'bippers' part of the puzzle. Just tweet '@eventtrack start*bippers' on your twittering device of choice and eventtrack will 'tag' your messages so that they hit the 'bippers' stream. Now, there is one drawback here - all of your messages will be picked up by eventtrack and 'tagged' whether they be BIP related or not. You can turn off the tagging by sending '@eventtrack stop*bippers' at any time, thats going to get annoying very quickly. Personally I think its small price to pay to get a BIP stream - I dont mind if you want to share your dinner plans with the group.

The stream is not there to replace the forum or blog but if you have links to blog articles, quick questions, etc then tweet em!

You can find me twittering under the mysterious guise of 'timdexter' - Im so imaginative! and watch the 'bippers' feed here - http://www.eventtrack.info/?t_event=bippers  or get the RSS feed here.

The more contributers we have, the more valuable the stream becomes. Give it a try, without you Im just a 'twit' in the wilderness :0)

Off to sunny and hopefully warm California today to visit der team in HQ - by the time you read this I'll probably be sipping Martini's (shaken not stirred you understand) at 35,000 feet. OK, it will be a cup of tepid, brown water masquerading as coffee with a packet of peanuts that will be warning me - 'may contain nuts.'

I have been working with customers recently on some proof of concepts around our web services with BPEL and Control-M (scheduling engine of lots of caffeine). I have also been testing the new stuff for the 10.1.3.4 release - some good enhancements coming that I thik are going to open up the BIP engine even more. Im trying to work on a barcoding solution that uses the new IDAutomation barcode library. And finally, I have been reworking my EBS bursting prose and getting the common region to work within a page in EBS. So, lots to write about and report in the coming weeks ... I'll be blogging from HQ, might be a little fluffy, I might be bitchin about the price of gas, or how bad the fruit quality is considering it all comes from CA, who knows ... 'oooh yes, another martini please', 'no shaken, thanks' - hey, I can dream  

Today, this little ol blog passed through its 1 millionth hit. Not bad even if I do say so myself, we started the blog almost 2 years ago. I have had some hiccups along the way where I burnt out - a bloggers life is a tough life. Give it a try, to consistently get useful content out and not blather on about a millionth hit takes some committed effort.

There are now more than 250 technical (for the most part) articles making the blog a good BIP resource. That said we are trying to work on getting some of this content into the core documentation. The search capabilities are not great, I now use Google directly to find stuff - the blog is pretty near the top of most BIP realated searches. Tagging articles is a pain in the backside - thats down to the blogging software we use, I believe we're migrating sometime in the near future to something much better.

So, congratulations readers, I write but you read and use and a million hits tells me its worth my while there are folks out there and Im not writing into a void. Keep the comments coming - I know I planned to get some web service stuff out there and I have had requests on the 'how-to' for the OAF common region - been caught up in other things this week - will try and deliver in the next week or so.

Well its that time of year again ... and I dont mean taxes. Saying that you better have got them done by the time Collaborate rolls around again this April. There are lots of opportunities to check out BIP/XMLP related content.

This year it's in my home'ish town - so rather than stare at the four walls of a non descript hotel room. I get to help my kids with their homework face to face rather than down a phone and I get sleep in my own bed every night. The drawback is I have to get my sorry backside up to Denver everyday but the upside is that there is loads to see and listen to when it comes to Publisher.
Here's what I have found so far:

I'll be digging around a bit more in coming weeks but there are some great looking sessions in there and if time allows I'll be at every one. Best laid plans and all that, it will no doubt snow and the trains will fail and I'll miss them but I'll being doing my damndest to get there. 

If you're coming, look out for me lurking at the back of sessions. Apart from mine of course, on Thursday @8.30am, the morning after the party - I'll try and not be too energetic and loud!

OAUG has started and I have to start with a couple of apologies. Firstly to the members of the XMLP SIG and Abhishek who runs it. I completely missed Sunday's early bird 8.30am get together - not that I could not drag myself out of bed that early, I promise. I had in fact been up most of the night nursing sickly family members after a rather dodgy meal on Saturday night at one of our local haunts - Sunday morning was spent in an emergency room and clearing up the dinner from the night before - enough said I think! I believe Abhishek is going to try and organize something for later in the week.

The other apology is to the folks presenting this morning on Label Printing and FSG Reporting with XMLP. I very much wanted to attend but my car conspired against me - this is the last time, its headed for the heap or at best the local high school's metal shop!

I did manage to get into Denver this afternoon on my motorcycle - what a day to ride, mid 60s and empty'ish roads on the the way there. With this fella to greet you ...



I got to stand at the back of Mike's session on all things BIP - its interesting being on the other end of a presentation. The acoustics in the room were not great but Mike's timing was impeccable getting through slides and demos with time for questions - perfect!
 We were discussing after the session the mix of audience there was in the room - there are obviously still folks that have not been Bipped. But there are others that have built some very interesting reports/integration and there is clearly a need for a more advanced session - well that was our thought. We joked that we could probably fill a day of BIP only sessions, all the flavors, newbie stuff, template building, data extraction, security, the list goes on ... I need to resurrect the plan to provide webinars for you folks!

Theres a new version of the Enterprise release training now available, its a 3 day instructor led course, looks pretty good if you're just starting out with BIP.

Oracle BI Publisher 10g R3: Fundamentals (Data Warehousing and Oracle Business Intelligence)

There is also the 5 day E Business Suite course being run all over the place, fancy a trip to Alaska? I hear Anchorage is a great place to visit. Alternatively pack the kids and get to Orlando, they can check out the mouse while you use your nouse!

11i Oracle XML Publisher Fundamentals (NAMER) (E-Business Suite)

There is also the PeopleSoft training course for XMLP

XML Publisher for PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools Rel 8.48 (PeopleSoft Enterprise)

Its a one day affair but boy do they pack stuff in for it - I mentioned it in more detail here. You can also study from the comfort of an armchair at home using the CD-ROM option.

Last but not least is the JD Edwards  training

EnterpriseOne Embedded BI Publisher Rel 8.97 - RWC (JD Edwards EnterpriseOne)

Its a self study course rather than instructor led but again looks to be good. I have also heard rumor of hands-on labs for JDE XMLP at OpenWorld this year - more news as I get it.

All the courses are introductions to the various flavors of XMLP/BIP, I have no doubt that there will be a Siebel CRM course coming soon. But thats it, introductions to get from a 'noob' to an intermediate but no further, after that its time to hit the docs and the forums for answers. I did enquire as to the possibility of an Advanced class but its a no no ... historically they have not been worth it for OU, just could not get the numbers of folks to fill the classes.

I have talked about doing a regular 'public' session on XMLP/BIP where we can take things a bit further and look at more advanced features, case studies, etc but you guys are just too quiet - I got maybe one or two emails saying 'yes please!' - any one else out there interested?

If you cant email then get over the mix.oracle.com and click - they are currently allowing you to vote for or suggest sessions for OOW08. I have posted the idea of providing an 'Advanced Publisher Techniques' session but its currently languishing in 50-60th place - get over there and vote for it - https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/27984-advanced-techniques-for-bi-publisher

Even if we dont get to the top we can maybe do a session in the 'unconference' on some of the more advanced stuff or maybe one of you could, I'll stand at the back and clap and cheer loudly!

Yesterday I provided an update on available training fro BIP in its various flavors. I tacked on to the end of the post the fact that we had little, if any, more advanced training available. I mentioned the 'Advanced Techniques for BI Publisher ' session I had proposed on OracleMix and we needed votes or at least an idea of how popular such a session at OOW08 might be. Overnight we have rocketed up the charts from ~50th to joint 16th place - it only took 10 extra votes but they count we are officially a mover and shaker. I was impressed with you dear readers!

Why?

1. I now know I have at least 10 readers - assuming you all read and acted on yesterdays post :0)
2. I was more impressed by the fact that several of you posted comments about the possible session. So it was not just a click fest but you felt strongly enough to want to comment
3. There is obviously a hunger out there for more advanced information and we need to satisfy the need.
4.  The power of the blog - a simple article spurred you into action.

So, I know we have at least one session in place for BIP at OOW - its a more apps oriented session and we plan to talk about all the apps that use BIP plus how you might setup the standalone application as the central reporting server across your applications. Im now talking to Mike in the product management team about providing a more advanced techniques session. We have discussed this in recent months but were not sure how much demand there might be for it. Now, 16 votes is not bad, the top session currently has 31 votes - neither are going to fill a room thou or provide enough 'clout' to say the demand is there - we need more votes people!

That said, not everyone can get to OOW and looking at a powerpoint slide deck, even with notes is not the most useful thing in the world. To satisfy the non-OOWers, I have, in the past raised the idea of doing monthly/bi-weekly 'public' BIP sessions where we can discuss techniques, go through some worked examples, have a template clinic, etc I'd like to do it but dont want to be talking into the ether for an hour - is this something else you might want to join? I want it to be a two way street thou, I'll kick off the first few but after that I need folks to step up and maybe walk through some of their stuff, templates, architecture and such like. Drop me a mail or comment, let me know what you want to see - if I see enough interest I'll get it organized and we can see how it goes.

Last week I asked you readers out there if you were interested in some regular 'User Sessions'? I also posed the same question over on the 'Bippers' group on Mix. I was not quite overwhelmed with mail and replies but those that did reply were vorciferous in their replies, a resounding 'Yes Please!'

The ball is now back in my court to get this organized, I have had some thoughts.

1. Timing - I had several replies from folks in EMEA as well as the US - so Im going to aim for a reasonably early call here in Colorado (-7 GMT) say 9am here, would be 4pm London and 5pm CET. The problem is that this is getting near stupid o clock in APAC - 8.30pm in India, 12am in Japan, Im not even going to get into Australia with 3 timezones all to itself - not good. Im prepared to do two sessions one in my morning and an evening one but I need to hear from folks to gauge where demand is?

2. Flavors - I need to cater to many BIP users we have BIEE, BIP (Standalone) EBS, PeopleSoft and JDE with the likes of Siebel CRM coming soon and a slew of others coming in the next few months. We can have generic sessions where we can focus on things like template building, common to everyone  but Im sure we will want to have 'flavor' specific sessions that are not going to appeal to all. So, Im going to propose alternating sessions Generic-Specific-Generic. When we get to flavors that Im not so hot on (yeah, there are some) I'll endevour to get guest speakers in.

3. Content - so what do you want to know? Chatting to folks I have seen that you get going very quickly spewing out listing reports like there is no tomorrow but you hit a wall soon after when you start to get into the more complex layouts e,g, POs, Invoices where you need funky stuff in your templates like T&Cs on the back of every page that do not contribute to the total number of the pages in the document. We have lots of 'intermediate' folks at this stage, we also have an army of noobs wanting to know how to get started and Im pleased to say there are a bunch of experts out there. You'll find some of them hanging out on the forum sharing the BIP love!

Initially, Im going to pitch it at the 'intermediate' folks, we can cover the more advanced features in templating, data extraction and the flavor specific stuff. I will come up with a session schedule for as many as I can think of and get it posted. You can then make murmurings of approval or jump up and down with cries of derision - we're going to have to suck it and see!

4. Get Involved - its not all going to be me. I really want this to be a real 'user group' - or at least how I envisage one i.e. everyone gets involved. I need guest speakers. Dont panic, I do not expect folks to dissect an invoice template - just present to the group what you have been doing, maybe your reports, your architecture, etc. No need for slides, unless you want to. If you are happy to do something, drop me a mail with a rough outline so I can get you on the session schedule - before you know it you'll be a BIP Superstar. Any volunteers? 

5. Announcements - you'll here about a session here on the blog and on the Bippers group in mix. I have been pinging Jake about being able to message Bippers group members via mix but thats open to spamming so they do not currently have that available. If you want to ensure you get an announcement 'Get a BIPScription' - see the box on the right hand side, Just provide your email and FeedBurner will look after the rest.

So, look for an announcement soon for our inaugural session and gimme some feedback on exactly what you want to see/discuss!

I was doing some housekeeping last night and noticed that the first few posts on the blog had finally dropped off the bottom of the page. Regular readers will have noticed that I list all of the articles, well I used to list all of them on the right hand side of the page. So we have hit and passed the 300 article line - not as prolific as some but there is some good stuff in here. We lack an easy way to tag entries on our bloging platform and the search facility leaves a little too much to be desired, so you can just do a Ctrl-F and use the browser window search to help out.

This would be useful if I did not use such ambiguous titles for the posts, some are OK and obvious like 'Data Template Building & Performance', others like 'If 'Have Cold' then 'Doctor' else 'Misery'' are getting there but you still get the gist. Others like, 'Come in from cold ...' and 'How to improve your image' probably leave you wondering, I know I am. You might think Im phishing for hits from non-bippers - Im not. I just think Im being a smart alec, although I do have an article lined up currently called 'Hard Core Sorting' - think we might need a title change there. Although the solution is pretty cool!

Anyhoo, I wanted to thank the various folks that have contributed articles (I need more) and to you all out there for reading. Its been tough sometimes to keep going but the positive feedback I get and the hits this blog gets means that folks are finding it all useful. If you're thinking about getted started on a blog check out Jake's article from a few days ago on starting a blog, just remember 'pace' yourself and dont burn out. The blog has turned into a real web resource for all things BIP, so here's to the next 300, cheers! 

Or the 'Oreas' sounds like a cookie or maybe a new species of whale but its not. And I quote:

The Oracle Excellence Awards have been launched to honor our customers and their partners (System Integrators, Consultants, ISVs, etc) who are creatively using Oracle Fusion Middleware with Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards etc) to create innovative and standards-based technology solutions.

This includes you bippers, Publisher is under the Fusion Middleware umbrella - if you are using standalone/BIEE Publisher with your Applications instance you need to enter. Among other prizes there is a free pass to OpenWorld (or other regional conferences) up for grabs.
So if you are perhaps using Enterprise to pull data from Siebel CRM and PeopleSoft or maybe calling the Enterprise server from your app via web services and distributing reports to recipients via email or any other type of integration with an Oracle Application. I know there are some of you out there - you need to enter! You also need to drop me an email and let me know what you are up to and we can share it with the wider Publisher world.

More details and an entry form are available here, http://www.oracle.com/goto/excellenceawards/index.html

I have not forgotten, how could I? I have been buried in testing for Fusion, sitting in Fusion meetings, discussing Fusion Publisher with any one who will listen, putting together an internal 2 day seminar on Fusion Publisher and pretty much anything else you might care to mention about Fusion. Did I mention Fusion enough in that last sentence! 
Im traveling this week and possibly next so mark your calendars: 

     Getting to Know You 
      26th June @ 9am Mountain Daylight Time 

Not earth shatteringly exciting but I want a session to get to know you, get to know your interests, what do you want to cover, your skill level, who might want to present in coming months, etc. I'll then publish a session plan for the next few months. As I mentioned before, we can mix it up to cater to everyones tastes and flavors! 

To sign up, I'll need emails so I can send invites. You can either:

1. Sign up from blog updates via Feedburner - I can get your mail from them. You can sign up in the box opposite or from here.

2. If you have signed up as a member of the blog you'll get a mail. Please dont sign up as a member for now. We are moving to a new blogging server soon - yippeeee. Im not sure if members will come across right now.

3. Lastly, drop me a mail if you dont want to use feedburner.

That should cover about 800 thus far, if you have not signed up, sign up and watch your inbox!

If the time is not going to work for you this time we can mix that up too - Im trying to think of those behind me in time and those across the Atlantic. Those of you in APAC - mail me and tell me you need your own session and it shall be so, if there are enough of you.

Looking forward to this kick off and lots of ideas from you for sessions, I'll have fingertips at the ready to record them - this is going to be fun and hopefully a useful project for all of us.

We are moving to a new blogging platform on July 1st. In the interim I can not post to this blog so Im off for some Blogging R&R. the new platform looks so much better for you folks. I'll be able to categorize more easily, even hierarchies and tag articles so searching is going to be much easier. We have plans to group articles together based on category and tags and generate PDF docs for you in the near term and make them available on our OTN pages - life will be sweeter.

Don't panic, you will still be able to access all existing articles both before and after the move to our new host.

See you in July!

Now the dust has settled a bit and I have gotten some things working that I always wanted, its time to talk about the new look. Better, yes? We have moved to a new blogging platform.

OK, so the look and feel is not so important, its the content right? Same old content but with some nice bells and whistles. Check out the bar on the left - if you're reading this via email, apparently about 600 of you, click here to see what Im talking about

1. You get to see pics of where I live and work - not quite the view from my office window but not far away


2. Much better search capabilities, 'Search All Blogs' will invoke the Oracle Enterprise search across all blogs. Yesterday, searching for 'bi' or 'xml publisher' did not find links to this blog .... ahem! Today we're top of the list.
   The other search box is for Google to scour over the content here.


3. Useful links - I'll be expanding this for sure. Lots of comments recently about there not being a single source that pulls all the BIP content together!


4. Recent comments - not sure how useful this is and it needs some work on the formatting ...


5. Recent Posts - nuff said!


6. Top Tags - finally we have tagging! The top tags are a little skewed right now as I have been trawling back through the 300 odd posts tagging and re-categorizing them. Im about a third of the way through - bear with me. Should be useful thou, if your looking for something in particular.


7. Categories - the new platform supports multiple categories and hierarchical ones at that. I have tried to break things down without going to crazy - the numbers next to the categories are again skewed as I work through articles. Have put a shout out to uber blogger Steven for slogging through the reformatting of the hierachy to make it readable!


8. Publisher Blogs - no blogroll right now, this is a list of the latest blog articles about 'BI Publisher' or 'XML Publisher'. Google provides a neat RSS feed of the blog search I set up and WebRSS allows me to be lazee and formats into a list for me. I have not worked out how to exclude yours truly from the list yet! Want to subscribe to the RSS feed from the Google search? hit the RSS icon. Get your article on the blog!


9. Subscriptions - RSS is there of course and you can still get the daily email of the latest article via Feedburner.

   There it is, standard stuff for most of you bloggers out there but we are finally catching up. If you have ideas for more 'stuff' let me know.
   

I mentioned the new demos that were being built a while back. We have now got enough of them to make them available. We are starting off with about 10 of them - they cover 'templating' for the most part. Its been a team effort, kudos to Noelle, Dave and Jen for putting the demos together.

There are some of the newer features we have in the Template Builder for Word, PDF template building and other tips and tricks. Its going to be a growing collection of demos over the coming weeks and months covering all things Publisher. I'll also be begging our PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel brethren for content to mount. If you have requests let us know.

You can get at the catalog here:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/xml-publisher/demoshelf/Shelf.html

For those that are interested in the delivery vehicle - its good ol Adobe Flex - we have to thank Ely Greenfield from Adobe and www.quietlyscheming.com for the Flex Shelf component - its a great component that we leverage to get away from the boring HTML formatted list.
Make sure you visit the catalog frequently to get the latest and greatest.

Not to miss the iPhone BI wave, we, well Hiro from our development team has been beavering away in a darkened room and has emerged with ... Publisher on iPhone. Not being an owner, much to my son's chagrin I have not been able to test it out locally but you can check out the recording of what he has come up with.

Right now you can login to the Publisher server and navigate the report folders to view report outputs - its a start. We are discussing the enhancements, etc we want - how much more would a user on the road want? Do you want to be able to run reports? Schedule them?

Maybe we'll have a Publisher app on the iPhone application store before too long.

After a whistle stop trip to HQ this week Im back in the saddle. Not sure why I put myself through the itinerary I came up with.With my wife out of town, kids with friends and a commitment to providing a two day Fusion Publisher course I needed to get to California and back to Colorado as quickly as possible.
That meant leaving home on Monday morning @3.30am to get into HQ for 8.30am - its a long trip to the airport here. Giving the seminar 10-5 ish Mon/Tues, not sleeping because my sinuses 'bung' up once I hit sea level and then jumping on a plane at 7.15 last night - after a delay I got to Chez Dexter at about 1am - exhausting! Dogs were glad to see me - I was not so glad to meet the 90 degree heat that we still have.

The Openworld team announced the 25 winners of the 'Suggest a Session' for OOW on Mix this week. We missed the cut by 2 votes - so no advanced session on Publisher this year :0( Unless two of the winners can't make it of course.
I'll try and do an Unconference session, which makes a welcome return this year, if anyone is interested.

I have just realized that I did not report on the user session we had last month. We had a fair few folks on the phone and came up with a decent list of topics to discuss.

• Karmit Goren R2L values in English environment. (We currently use English environment of Oracle Applications 11.5.10.2) - Karmit, you still have not told me what R2L is?
• Writing templates in Excel
• Future of Excel outputs
• Tips & Tricks
• Roadmap
• Jim Deak Better training materials
• Dave Barnes Advanced templating, especially some of the XSL and XPath techniques
• FSGs- Karen Brownfield - How to add more information into FSG reports Reporting attributes turned on for non-Gov customers
• Drill down from report outputs
• Bursting session Introduction Listener examples Dynamic delivery options
• Non IPP for Faxing – custom delivery channel
• R12 Payments Process
• Differences btw 11i and 12
• Purchase Orders - Customizing the PO report?
• Report Repository?
• Data Template Builder!
• Flex Lexical
• Default output format update
• RTF templates - Fixed # of rows
• Scalability Tips
• Etext Session
• Zebra Label Printing
• Charting – Temple Builder
• EBS vs Standalone versions
• XPATH/XSL Expressions
• Discoverer Integration
• Migration from 11i -> 12
• Siebel CRM Integration?
• Java Integration Introduction
• RDF -> RTF migration

Quite a list, I was asking everyone for more until Karen pointed out that if we met once a month we had enough here for a couple of years!
Some of the requests, I dont think, warrant a full session I can blog about them. Others like Jim's comment - duly noted :) We had a few volunteers for sessions, I seem to remember Karen offering help on an FSG session and Kevin, the new eText template meister offered help on an eText session.
I'll get a schedule together and post it as soon as I can!

Im back from a week of R&R that involved a lot of water. White water rafting on the Arkansas river - quite good fun but not scary enough, need to go earlier in the season. A day at Waterworld - some seriously scary rides down watery slides. A lazy afternoon on the local South Platte river sitting (for the most part) on an over inflated car inner tube.

The scenery was spectacular, the rapids a lot of fun - the cycling 6 miles back up river to pick up the car very enjoyable, if a little hot.

I was away a week and Im amazed at the number of comments the blog attracted - lots of comments and many questions that I would kindly request be directed to the public forum. I get on there as often as possible and its so much easier to answer questions there than on the blog.

The 10.1.3.4 release is imminent and I have been working on some other articles for the coming weeks. Its good to be back, well quite good - I could spend weeks floating down that river!

You may have noticed trawling the intertubes (a much better word than 'net' from Jake over at AppsLab) that there is a new Publisher blog popped up on blogs.oracle.com. the man behind the prose is Kan Nishida.

Kan hails from Oracle Consulting and before that our sister team in developer, 'Internationalization' - not really a sister as such but our esteemed 'man in charge' used to run both teams. Suffice to say Publishers i18N and translation support had to be a model citizen in the Oracle products world.

I dont think we are going to clash on subject matter, even if we do, its more information for you folks out there. Kan states in his inaugural post:

'Our focus is BI Publisher related solutions and best practice from implementation and project delivery point of view.'

From that statement and his next post Im reading - Tim's talking about the product, features and capabilities, we're talking about the 'how' from an implementation perspective. The 'how' is a little tougher for me, I get involved in customer implementations occasionally and glean what I can on the pain and feed it back to development. Kan and his team are in a supremely better position to talk about the 'how'. So, welcome Kan, looking forward to many interesting posts.

• Monday 11-6pm
• Tuesday 9-6pm
• Wednesday 9-6pm
• Thursday 9-1.30pm

• Wednesday 12-2pm Moscone West 2nd Floor Lobby - Section 2

More Openworld stuff today, apologies to those of you not coming. There will be blogging and tweeting galore, plus the Openworld web site for you to keep up.

I have a session on Monday @5.30pm! As it will be close to dinner time, I thought it might be fun to have a 'pot luck', so some of you bring starters, others entrees and of course we need desserts - we'll need 'cold beverages' too! Let me know what you're bringing and I'll collate a list so we dont get 10 lots of 'chips and salsa' :0)
When I got the time slot I was a little disappointed but looking at the sheer number of sessions they needed to go this late to get it all in so I guess it was pot luck when it came to giving out timeslots.

The title, 'What's New with Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher: The Standard Reporting Platform for All Applications' is a big mouthful. In the world of BIP for Apps there is a fair amount of new stuff. There is a big Siebel integration coming, JDE and PS are planning new releases, EBS has added some new functionality. Thats gonna fill about 30mins of the hour we have.

So whaddya want to talk about for the rest of the time? I can fill it with demos and talk about the standalone release, I can get into the depths of templates ... you know me I can talk for hours about this product. But, I wanted to give you the chance to influence the content. Bear in mind we are going to be a mixed apps audience, discussing the intricaces of XSLT Axes is not going to have wide appeal and after a long day I do not want to hear snoring at the back.

Im planning on doing at least one UnConference session, probably covering the 'Anatomy of a Template' series of posts I did a while back - so you hard core 'templaters' can get your fix then.

I would love to hear from anyone that is happy to stand up and talk about their experiences, good or bad - we can get a slide or three together. Walk us through your templates, show us some of your report outputs, have you built some cool functionality using BIP? This is the best type of presentation for the whole audience - a real person who uses the product. Let me know if your interested with a comment.

You can bet that with a 5.30 timeslot, Im going to be bouncy and keeping you all awake with a surprise or two. Don't forget the chips and salsa, oh those little sausage wiener things are quite nice too and while we're at it some spinach filled spanakopita would be good.

... happened on the way to the forum. For the uninitiated, Frankie Howerd was a fabulous British comedian from my youth, fantastically camp and ever so slightly 'saucy' - "Oooh nooo missus". I can't think of an American comedian that even comes close?

Now things seemed to have calmed down on the Oracle Forums with respect to performance I think its safe to talk about the new version of the Publisher forum. We have a very active forum, not one of the top guns like SQL or the database but the top BI related

Maybe not in number of threads, Disco still holds that crown but in sheer number of views we have steamed ahead. So it appears folks are at least finding the forum whether directly or through their favorite search engine. I can not say whether the quality of the answers is good enough for folks but that brings me to another talking point.

I have had a couple of mails asking why folks have been demoted to 'noob' status on the forum. The forum is no longer rewarding folks for the volume of posts but now there is a reward scheme for the quality of the posts.

If you ask a question and someone answers it you can award them points, 10 for a perfect answer, 5 for a 'helpful' one. So, if someone has taken the time to look at your question, go and look up the solution or share some of their knowledge please reward them with some points. We are certainly not a forum of newbies so don't be put off by everyone's status.

There are now a core bunch of helpful folks out there contributing to the forum. Im very appreciative, its making my life easier to login of a morning and seeing that Vetsrini, SteveCallan, M14, rwillems and others have jumped into the fray and have bashed out answers to questions. Sorry, if I missed any other regulars, I know I have.




The other new thang is the new message editor, no more pain writing HTML that you could not easily re-edit of you made a mistake, there is now a rich text editor. You can even add emoticons to your post, if you are so inclined?!?

Sadly the only thing lacking, that would really help our forum is the ability to upload files. If I had a dollar for the number of times I see a question that could be so easily answered more quickly, if I could 'see' the template and data files, I'd have a lot of dollars. I guess that wont be here anytime soon. As a workaround, if you can mount your files somewhere on the web and point to them you are going to get an answer much more quickly!

So, onward dear readers, keep posting questions and please give back by answering when you can and very quickly you'll move out of 'noob' status and into the realm of 'Journeyman' Sorry ladies, this is evidently a man's forum, I guess Journeylady, Journeygal or Journeyperson does not trip off the tongue so well :0(

I have had a few questions recently asking about our support for Postscript fonts. Yes, we do support them but we dont document it. Why? We want you to use Truetype fonts if at all possible. We support those thoroughly, PS Fonts, not quite so well.

If you still want to use the PS fonts you will need the pfb and pfm files and you'll have to do some manual set up in the config file yourself. The xdo.cfg file needs to sit under the JAVA_HOME/jre/lib directory and will need the following entry under the fonts section.

<font family="IDAutomationC128S" style="normal" weight="normal">
 <type1 pfb="D:\fonts\IDAutomationC128S.pfb" pfm="D:\fonts\IDAutomationC128S.pfm" />
</font>

Same rules apply as for Truetype fonts the family attribute needs to contain the font name you see in MSWord when selecting the font.
Once you have that set up on the server you will be able to see the font in your outputs. Just remember, we strongly recommend using truetype fonts. If you get an issue with your PS fonts let us know through an SR but no promises on addressing it.

After a frantic week of preparation Im finally here in San Francisco, this year I get toi stay downtown, so no busing it in from the peninsular. The flip side is, lots of walking Im a good 10 blocks from the Moscone center but thats all good.

Arrived in Oracle town where even the pavements have Oracle blurb, the town has been truly painted red. There was supposed to be an OAUG XML Publisher user group meeting this afternoon, sadly it got canceled.

So we nade up for it by getting over to the APEX/Publisher hands on session at the Marriott.

A nicely filled room with folks getting some experience developing and implementing Publisher reports with APEX.

Tomorrow, demo grounds and my session @5.30pm in Moscone West 2024 - still got plenty of room, so come on down.

Plenty of other BI related sessions worth checking out too.

11:30 am – 12:30 pm
S299587 - Introduction to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
Mike Donohue, Oracle;
Nick Psomas, Oracle
Marriott Salon 9
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

S299155- Smart Reporting in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials
Amarnath Molugu, Oracle;
Mohit Saggi, Oracle
Moscone West - 2006
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

S299581- Oracle Business Intelligence Road Map and Strategy
Paul Rodwick, Oracle
Marriott Salon 9
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

S300603 - Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Automation: Bursting and Document Delivery in E-Business Suite
Tim Sharpe, CD Group
Moscone West - 3003
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

S300247 - Considering an Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10.2 or 12? Learn from a Recent R12 Upgrade
Teresa Kim, California Department of General Services;
Glenn Webb, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Moscone West - 3006

5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
S298463 - What's New with Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher: The Standard Reporting Platform for All Applications
Tim Dexter, Oracle
Moscone West - 2024

A hectic Monday, a morning on the demo grounds and an agonising afternoon getting ready for our 5.30 dinner appointment, sorry Publisher session. I think it was too late in the day, I could hear stomachs rumbling from the stage.

The spot we have on the demo grounds is prime real estate, we are right on the front of the demo section at the end of the main walkway into the exhibition hall - you can not miss us and yoiu have no excuse not to come and say Hi! In the south hall we have EBS and a standalone demo pods. Over in the West hall you'll find JDE, PeopleSofy and Siebel pods - yep, Publisher is taking over!

Other than the session being late, its went OK. Somewhere between my hotel room and the room my presentation managed to mangle itself completely. I'll et that cleaned up and posted here soon.

We had a good mix of folks, majority of you still EBS but a good smattering of JDE, PeopleSoft and Siebel bippers. You all certainly seem to be 'maturing' in your use of Publisher with many folks now live and generating some of the tougher documents that you need, Im talking check printing, invoices and purchase orders.

Special mention to Lisa, Lisa volunteered as a complete newbie to come up on stage and build a template with a little help from Noelle. She finished way faster than I expected and proceeded to tell the audience 'how simple building templates' was, a bit like 'mail merge' AT this point I have to say, I did not know Lisa, did not pay her, etc - she got a cool t-shirt for here trouble thou!

Tomorrow I have scheduled an Unconference session @3pm on 3rd Floor Moscone West - I have some t-shirts left so come, if not for the session, on advanced templating, then for the free shirt !

Nearly half way through ... phew! I have not seen this many people since last years OOW. Now that we live out 'in the sticks' and rarely visit downtown Denver seeing this much huanity at once is a bit of a shock. Now I sound like some country hick, but it it pretty quiet where we live, blink and you miss it.

Attended a full session on JDEdwards E1 and Publisher this morning. Publisher was billed as 'Oracle's best kept secret'. To a large extent I have to agree - poling the attendees at my session last night, nearly half the room had only just heard of Publisher. I feel a little guilty trolling out the same old intro slides but the majority of folks are still wanting to learn about it. Tomorrow, I rectify things a bit and I have a session at the 'Unconference.'

For the uninitiated, its held outside of the main rooms, projector, microphone(I think) and your laptop and how ever turns up. Im going to try and get into some of the more advanced techniques in templating and anything else folks want to cover. Hope to see you there with some goodies to give away - Moscone West 3rd Floor Overlook I.
If you have more generic questions, Im at the Meet the Experts session from 12-2pm Moscone West 2nd Floor Lobby - Section 2

This afternoon was spent on the demo grounds switching between the Publisher for Applications and the Enterprise pods. Very busy with lots of questions. Here's the worn out Applications pod gang.

Thats Bogeon 'the Patchman' Kim, Kevin the I've had a little too much coffee, Support Meister McDermott and Noelle 'the Fixer' Bartlam. Sorry about the photo guys and gal - I blame the camera! Kevin was 'in da house' this afternoon giving demo after demo ... awesome stuff. He's here all week, so come on by and catch a performance.

I have had a coupe of mails asking where I am? Im here, I took a week away from writing for the blog - needed a rest and some time to think about a bigger, paper based project :0)

I put together a viewlet last week for a colleague on how the Oracle Reports migration library can be used - its now residing in the demo catalog here or you can access it directly here.

I used a fairly simple Oracle Report but I think it covers the 'can' and 'can't' of the migrator. I'll say right here, its not magic, it will not transform all of your report pixel for pixel, format trigger for format trigger but it gets you a long way down the road.
For the BIP uninitiated I also put together a Oracle Reports to BI Publisher presentation that you might find useful. You can get that here.

Would be interested in feedback on the tool - there is a more 'souped up' version in the works that will turn your report to tomato or chicken noodle!

There is some new content on OTN, around training and its looking pretty good.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe_bi/bipub/index.html

• Getting Started with Oracle BI Publisher


• Exploring Advanced Features of Oracle BI Publisher



• Integration


• Integrating Oracle BI Publisher with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
  
• Oracle BI Publisher and BI Discoverer Integration



• BI Publisher for Applications


• Creating PeopleSoft Reports Using XML Publisher


• Creating Reports in Oracle E-Business Suite Using XML Publisher

There's some neat stuff in there, in particular the Advanced Features, not really really advanced but some very useful subjects get covered, drillable reports, multi data reports and finally some data templates. I have not tried the Disco integration OBE but fully intend to take it for a spin later this week. Enjoy!

I have mentioned the 'Iceman' Ike's blog in the past among others, its a veritable goldmine. Im not sure this is a good likeness I can not access his picture on his blog anymore, I dont remember him being so blue?

He dropped me a mail recently from the icy north where he hails from, on an article he put together on logging/debugging. Although not a flattering article for BIP its extremely useful - we need to get that metalink note updated, Ike whats the number? A Neat how-to on turning on the logging facility in BIP under EBS.

He links to another article in there on using BIP APIs with OA Framework - there are two in the series and both extremely useful. They highlight the IDE that Ike has come up with for folks needing to work in JDeveloper/OAF with BIP APIs - not the easiest task in the world to get the right supporting libraries in place. Ike walks you though it all - well worth checking out!

Heading off to Collaborate next week. Very glad to see that OAUG, Quest and IOUG have created a joint scheduling tool.

I can now search across all three tracks and see that there are over 50 sessions that include Publisher in some way or form. A nice range of intro to advanced topics covering the various deployments of Publisher in EBS, JDE and stand alone. I plan to attend as many as my schedule will allow.

Here are a few being delivered by Oracle folks -- oddly all on Wednesday May 6. That must be our designated day.

Please also drop by the "Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition" demo pod (#9) in the Oracle Booth (#4780) in the Exhibit Hall if you have any questions or want to see a demo of BI Publisher Enterprise or BI EE. You may also be able to get application specific demos at the following demo pods:

Oracle E-Business Suite Tools and Technology (15)
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools (38)
PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools (1)
JD Edwards World Applications (40)

Stop by the Oracle Reception Booth after your visit to the demo pods. I'm told that there is a "extremely retro-cool" thank you gift.

Have you ever faced a situation where your dates are just gone wild? For example, you could swear that the date in your XML data is 2009-03-01 (March 1st, 2009), but it shows up on your report as 28-FEB-2009!

I have seen several emails the last few months come to the help mailing list with date formatting related questions, that I thought this might be a worthwhile topic for a blog article.

The cause of this, what some call “odd” behavior, is a combination of four things:

1. How dates are stored in the XML data
2. Whether and how you format dates in the RTF template
3. The timezone that you run the report
4. And this thing called Coordinated Universal Time known as UTC
   

If you find the acronym UTC confusing, it’s because it’s a backronym, not an acronym! Long story short, blame it on the French (or the Americans, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are!) You can read all about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time.

So…, here is how these four things together can ruin your “date”!

1. At run time, BI Publisher server converts dates that you have applied a format mask in your RTF template to the timezone that the report is destined for (the report timezone).
2. When you apply a date format mask to a field in your RTF template, BI Publisher expects the incoming dates from the XML data to be in canonical format. That is, YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+HH:MM, a standard way to represent date and time in reference to UTC. The +HH:MM is the positive or negative difference of the timezone where the data originates from UTC/GMT.
3. If the time component and UTC offset is omitted (i.e. the XML date is in the format YYYY-MM-DD), BI Publisher interprets the date as YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00-00:00 (i.e. midnight GMT).

If you are responsible for generating the data for the report, you don’t need to worry about converting your dates to canonical format. BI publisher will do that automatically for you.

For example, when you issue the query “Select SYSDATE from DUAL” from BI Publisher, it generates the following XML data set:

<ROWSET>
<ROW>
<SYSDATE>2009-06-03T18:44:32.000-07:00</SYSDATE>
</ROW>
</ROWSET>

Of course no one likes to see dates on their report in that format!

Provided, you want dates and time to be converted to the appropriate time zone the report is destined for, the best and most straightforward approach to address that is to apply a format mask to the date field in your RTF template and let BI Publisher take care of the rest. 

For information on how and the types of format masks that you can apply to a date field refer to Number and Date Formatting in the product documentation: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12844_01/doc/bip.1013/e12187/T421739T481157.htm#4535403

You can also view the Formatting Dates demo available in our Demonstration Library on our OTN page. The URL to out demonstration library is:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/xml-publisher/demoshelf/shelf.html

Keeping in mind that if you apply a format mask to a date field in your RTF template, it will result in the conversion of dates and times depending on the report timezone, it’s quite normal for a date to roll back or forward by 1 when your run the report!

EXAMPLE 1
If you use <?format-date:SYSDATE;'LONG_TIME'?> in your RTF template, with the following data set:

<ROWSET>
<ROW>
<SYSDATE>2009-06-03T18:44:32.000-07:00</SYSDATE>
</ROW>
</ROWSET>

It will result in these dates displayed on the report:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Report Timezone                                                                             SYSDATE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[GMT – 07:00] – America/Los _Angeles                                  Wednesday, June 3, 2009 6:44 PM
[GMT + 08:00] – Asia/Singapore                                              Thursday, June 4, 2009 9:44 AM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Think about it, in this example, the value of SYSDATE is the time I am writing this blog article in California, Wednesday 18:44:32 (6:44 PM) PDT on June 3rd. My friend Babar in Singapore, 15 hrs ahead of me, is having his third cup of coffee at 9:44 AM, Thursday morning of Jun 4th! Nothing “odd” about that!

EXAMPLE 2
If instead the XML date in the data is in the format YYYY-MM-DD, as in the following data set,

<ROWSET>
<ROW>
<SYSDATE>2009-06-03</SYSDATE>
</ROW
</ROWSET>

Running the report using the same RTF template as above, it will result in these dates displayed on the report:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Report Timezone                                                                             SYSDATE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[GMT – 07:00] – America/Los _Angeles                                  Tuesday, June 2, 2009 5:00 PM
[GMT + 08:00] – Asia/Singapore                                             Wednesday, June 3, 2009 8:00 AM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The same reasoning applies here. BI Publisher interprets the value of SYSDATE to represent Wednesday, June 3, 12 AM GMT. For me, 7 hrs behind during daylight savings time, it’s still June 2, 5:00 PM. And my friend Babar in Singapore has just finished his first cup of coffee on June 3rd!

What if you don’t want dates to be converted based on the report timezone?

One solution to that is to extract dates in the format that you want them to appear on your report and don’t apply a format mask to date fields in the RTF template.  Chances are that BI Publisher will ignore the format mask anyway, unless the format that you extract the dates in matches the date part of the canonical format that dates are expected to be in (i.e., YYYY-MM-DD).

To extract dates in a specific format, you can use a TO_CHAR function in the query.  For example, "Select TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,’DD/MM/YYYY’) as SYS_DATE from DUAL" will generate the following data set:

<ROWSET>
<ROW>
<SYS_DATE>03/06/2009</SYS_DATE>
</ROW>
</ROWSET>

The other option is to extract dates in the format required by BI Publisher, and specify a timezone in the format mask for the conversion to override the default, which is the report timezone. If you specify a timezone with the same UTC offset as the dates in the XML data, no conversion takes place.

For example, <?format-date:SYSDATE;'LONG';’America/Los_Angeles’?> with the data in EXAMPLE 1, will always result in Wednesday, June 3, 2009 displayed on the report.

On the other hand, <?format-date:SYSDATE;'LONG';’UTC’?> with the data in EXAMPLE 2, will also result in Wednesday, June 3, 2009 displayed on the report.

Conclusion –
If you’d like your “dates” to behave, be nice to them and play by the rules!

Want to thank Srikant Subramaniam from the Oracle Fusion Middleware for Apps team for prompting this post.

As much as we here at Oracle would like to think that all data is in a database -- an Oracle Database at that, the fact is that sometimes ... dare I say it ... data is kept in Excel spreadsheets.

Srikant's team maintains some information in an Excel spreadsheet. To get this data into a nicely formatted PDF file was a tedious process that took 5 to 6 days. Srikant wanted to know if Publisher could help. The challenge was how to get the data out of the Excel spreadsheet into an XML file. After a little searching on the web, we worked out a way to do that.

Now his team can generate the desired output in a couple of hours. Over 20 times faster than it used to take. Saving at least 38 hours of precious time that can now be put toward other projects.

Srikant was kind enough to document this in a nice tutorial. The tutorial shows how to convert data from an Excel spreadsheet into a PDF document. The Excel data consists of a set of addresses, that are then grouped and sorted using the BI Publisher Template Builder to create the RTF template and the output PDF file. Here are the supporting files to run the tutorial.

Knowing that dates and nulls can sometimes be problematic, I took it a little further to test out an Excel spreadsheet with dates and nulls. Fortunately the NULL values are converted nicely and those elements with NULL values are absent in the resulting XML - just the way you want it so that values can be aggregated correctly.

The Dates however proved to be a little more challenging. In the XML data, they kept coming out as Excel number values and not in date canonical format. I was also using Excel 2007 so the process was a little different from what Srikant documented in the tutorial. Here are the differences for Excel 2007 and what I found I had to do to get Dates to come out in the XML correctly. Perhaps someone more clever has a better way ...

-- When converting the range to an XML List I was warned/prompted to use format or data type when mapping. When I chose data type (which I thought would work) I ended up with dates as the Excel number values in the spreadsheet and the exported XML data. So I went with "Use existing formatting" for the the mapping so the dates would still appear as dates in the spreadsheet.

However, exporting to XML still left the dates as Excel number values.

-- The "trick" is that you must create and apply a new "XML Map" (this appears to be the Excel term for XSD) that tells Excel that the date is to be mapped to an XML date format. The first step is to generate the XSD file. Set the focus in the data range and select "Create XSD files for the XML Schema at the active cell" from the XML Tools Add-in menu.

-- In the XSD you will see that the Date field is being treated as a string.

Modify it so that it's type is Date.

-- Upload the XSD as a new XML Map and map the field to this new XML map. Set focus on a cell in the region, right click and select the "XML Source" menu choice from the XML menu.

In the XML Source dialog click on the [XML Maps...] button. Add the XSD you just modified and rename it to something meaningful. Then delete the Root_Map that was there.

Click OK to return the XML Source dialog and drag and drop the Map elements onto the correct columns headers in the data range.

-- Now when you export to XML, the dates will be in canonical format and can be formatted correctly by the Template Builder or other XSL formatting tools.