Does not look that bad right? Sadly the new crosstab builder can not build what we need. Notice there is no summarization in the grid; just a listing of times for each employee, these are clock in/clock out times, no calculations.

Here's the data:

<?xml version="1.0" ?> 

<rowset>

 <row rownumber="1">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>08:15</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="2">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>12:15</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="3">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>13:15</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="4">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>17:30</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="5">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>10:00</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="6">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>14:15</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="7">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>15:15</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="8">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Wednesday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/18/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>19:30</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="1">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>07:50</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="2">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>11:59</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="3">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>12:35</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="4">

 <EMPL_NAME>John</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>18:00</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="5">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>9:00</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="6">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>13:25</TIME> 

 </row>

  <row rownumber="7">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>14:45</TIME> 

 </row>

 <row rownumber="8">

 <EMPL_NAME>Mary</EMPL_NAME> 

 <DAY>Thursday</DAY> 

 <DATE>11/19/2009</DATE> 

 <TIME>18:20</TIME> 

 </row>

</rowset>

So I went back to the old skool crosstab methods and built it manually.

Just a four celled table with an @column loop for the headings, regular for-each-group for the row headings, @cell loop for the 'measure' and then an inner 'current-group()' loop for the times.

You can get the RTF template here if you need it.

Sometimes you can teach a new dog old tricks!

http://husaindalal.blogspot.com/2009/11/integrating-bi-publisher-standalone.html

Thanks to Jurgen and Klaus for finding Hussein and his prose.

I have to admit, I have a twitter account, not much used. A facebook account, more used but mainly down to the ease of posting something via my trusty but horribly cracked iPhone (that's another story) Its been great to keep up with current friends and colleagues and find old school buddies and catch up, its fun but then what? That's kinda where my interest wains...

That is until this past week. Back in March my wife opened an ice cream shop in our town, its more of a village, blink and you miss it. The shop has an accompanying website cos Im geeky like that - I think we are the only shop in the vill ... town to have one. We get hits and comments and I write a blog for it posting pictures, news, etc. Our advertising budget is not huge so print media for the most part is out and 'sadly' except for Leslie and her WSJ subscription, who reads a paper these daze?

What about online advertising? I'm skeptical of that too, I make a point of blocking the common hosting servers that slow web pages while down loading their ads. I ignore them if they do get through. A quick straw poll and I found that most of my friends ignore them. So what alternatives are there?

My wife is a huge Facebook fan, so many friends and to my mind spends far too long on it :0) Rather like the pot calling the kettle black I suppose. Her computer skills have improved immensely since using it thou, so I should not complain. She still hits the button or icon 5 or 6 times if the reaction is not instant; makes for some fun trying to close 20 windows on a laptop that has been brought to its knees by 20 copies of Adobe Illustrator being opened at the same time :0)

I spotted 'fan' pages on FB a few weeks back and thought what better way to get some 'viral' exposure for the business in the surrounding area. My kids 'Facebook' too and they spend even more time on it than my wife, that's when they are not texting of course.

Its not going to cost me a bean so I duly started putting together the fan page (still working on some custom FBML content.) But we are now posting updates, pictures, getting to the videos and some freebies for the more motivated.

I then invited all of my wife's friends to become fans; within the week we were up to 50, admittedly some were from the UK, Canada and California which was not so good but its still useful. Why useful? Because of the viral nature of Facebook, even if the first fans are remote, they have friends that see them 'fanning' the shop, so they fan the shop. And so it goes on, eventually (I hope) getting back to folks in our area who may not know about the shop. How many degrees of separation are facebookers apart? We are just starting to break out of the 'friends' stage with fans that we do not know. Some from afar but others closer, so its starting.

Facebook, seems to have finally found it revenue stream in offering to target likely fans on their page with an ad on the right hand side of the page. Having already poo poo'ed online advertising earlier I dont think we'll be going there. Facebook does offer some great profiling thou, they know so much about users that I can run an add to 'male/female teenagers that live in our nearest town and like ice cream' ... awesome stuff!
They do have another cool feature that I do want to use. Im going to need my sons' help and their nasty texting habit. They do not know this yet but they will be texting their 100's of friends to text FB to become fans of the shop, if they so wish.
This is my master plan for world ice cream shop domination, getting more fans and the fans we want; ice cream eating fans that will nag their parents to bring them in.

This is all great but how about getting updates out there, we can move over to the fan page as administrators but what about other content? I created a 'twitter' account for the shop too, hey its free and 'real' people will find you, I think we boast more followers on twitter (excluding the scantily clad bots that seem to plague every twitter account) than fans on FB.
Twitter is not on my wife's radar at the moment so we needed some way to get her shop FB updates out as tweets. Facebook does that for you, even from a fan page now, easy. To take it a stage further I wanted to be able to write a blog posting from our Wordpress install, get that to FB and then out as a tweet. That took some finding but there is a plugin out there that almost does it. With a little tweaking I can now write a blog posting, hit a button to publish to FB and then FB pushes it out to twitter. Perfect!

I have finally seen the light, at least for my wife's business. For other bigger companies, maybe yours? The likes of Coca Cola and others boast huge numbers of fans, that kind of product awareness is invaluable ... every little helps I say! We'll be pushing as hard as possible into the social networking frontier for our little shop.

Level 1

• Siebel stores and manages the templates and manages data generation via integration objects


• At runtime, Siebel calls BIP via WS to process data+template to generate output and returns the document to the user.


• BIP just acts as a publishing service for Siebel

Level 2

• BIP stores the templates and a report definition. The report uses complex Siebel web services as its data source.
• At runtime, BIP is called via a button or menu item (custom), it then calls Siebel back via a WS to fetch the data (integration object)
• BIP then generates output and returns the document to the Siebel UI
• This is the recommended integration as user security can be applied to the data being returned by Siebel

Level 3

• BIP stores the templates and a report definition. The report uses SQL or stored procedure calls to retrieve data from the underlying database
• At runtime, BIP is called via a button or menu item (custom), BIP fetches data from Siebel DB
• BIP generates output and returns to Siebel UI

More details in a great white paper from John on the Siebel PM team, Siebel - BI Publisher Integration Concepts

If you are looking for info on how to migrate your existing Actuate reports in the context of Siebel - check out Kan's article over at the BIP Consulting Blog Once you have downloaded the migration assistant check out the viewlet and accompanying white paper.

Its not in the documentation yet but its pretty simple to do. In the template in MSWord use File->Properties->Summary->Title.

Enter your page title. Its only going to work for HTML for Excel and RTF output the Title property is filled. The title will not come through into your PDF outputs. The other properties are ignored in the final output. A little inconsistent I know, but that's the way it is today.

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.

I came up with the following template to let me at least seethe elements and assigned values:

<?for-each://*?>

Element: <?local-name()?> Value:<?current()/text()?>

<?end for-each?>

this pushed out

Element: ListOf_ssHlsCase Value:
Element: ssHlsCase Value:
Element: ssCaseNum Value:410194-14115562
Element: ssCreatedDate Value:10/20/2009 07:26:40
Element: ssDescription Value:
Element: ssName Value:Lew Golden - - 10/20/2009
Element: ssStage Value:Application
Element: ssStatus Value:Active
Element: ssSubStatus Value:
Element: ssSubjectContactFirstName Value:Lew
Element: ssSubjectContactLastName Value:Golden
Element: ssSubjectFullName Value:
Element: ssType Value:Other
Element: ssId Value:8SIA-8EJMY
Element: ssCreated Value:10/20/2009 07:26:40

Takes a little deciphering but I worked out that I was not using the integration object I thought I was, dagnabit! Useful thou I thought, so Im sharing it, enjoy!

There's a bunch of new content out there from Reporting Plaforms for Applications to Integration with MSSharepoint (nice article). For me, the best practices paper is the best (no I didnt write it :0) its packed with info and the PM folks have put notes on each slide in the PDF. Just click the note icon in the bottom right for some information on what the slide is getting at.

Its Monday, for most of you reading this, ease into the week with a peruse of the Publisher pages - http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/xml-publisher/index.html and a cup o java or char.

Between the two of us, Rob (colleague and data modeler extraordinaire) came up with a solution for a customer to generate this:

Its a tree of sorts, nothing fancy, we just wanted to get the structure right, so there are no details under the headings. Its getting the indenting correct that was the trick. The customer had a pretty fixed data structure and did not want to use nested tables.

The template is pretty simple, just a funky trick to get the indenting working. I mentioned the customer had a pretty fixed data structure. It made life easier, they only had 3 levels to worry about so the code to handle the indenting could be pretty straightforward and somewhat 'hard coded' for the data set.

It also has the advantage that the tree is in the right order ie

Level1
-Level2
-Level2
-- Level3
-Level2
Level1
Level1
...

The template looks like this

the fields contain

Of course the most interesting field is the C

<?if:number(LEVELS)=1?>
<?ORG_LONG_NAME?>
<?end if?>
<?if:number(LEVELS)=2?>
<?attribute@inblock:start-indent;'20.0pt'? > <?ORG_LONG_NAME?>
<?end if?>
<?if:number(LEVELS)=3?>
<?attribute@inblock:start-indent;'30.0pt'?> <?ORG_LONG_NAME?>
<?end if?>

A chhose statement would have worked just as well. You can see the dependence on the data order and the structure or more specifically LEVELS element. We need to check that to know how big the indentation should be.
The @block is also important, we need that to get the indentation to show only on the current text and not affect anything else. If we had been using tables we could have gotten around that.
Now we could have been a little smarter and written something to handle any number of levels ... answers on the back on a new Mac Book Pro 15-inch: 2.8GHz 4Gb 500Gb HD :0)

A quick Friday post on Siebel integration. Two pretty useful docs that John from the Siebel PM team recently shared with me.

8.1.1 TOI: Siebel BI Publisher Integration Functional Overview

http://oukc.oracle.com/static05/opn/login/?c=576002953&t=offering

Siebel Reporting Migration FAQ - Actuate and BI Publisher (external visible)

https://metalink3.oracle.com/od/faces/secure/km/DocumentDisplay.jspx?id=764097.1

Have a good weekend

I was on-site yesterday helping an ISV integrate BI Publisher into their product, and hit a few issues getting the product installed and running on the Weblogic application server. BI Publisher comes integrated out-of-the-box with OC4J and Oracle Application Server, but you'll need to install and configure it manually to work with other application servers [...]

You can read the full article HERE.

Many Thanks to Mark for his posting.

Now its 27F, sorry 'Rest of the Worlders', I have been assimilated. Its imperial measurements for me all the way. I even know what a 'quart' is, I think in inches and cups for measuring. America is sometimes staggering in its arrogance for the rest of the world! Maybe a bit strong but you know what I mean.
Yep, its freezing cold the wind is howling, the windshield (another Americanism along with tail pipe, thats a good one) blower on the car can not keep up with the freezing rain and I have to scrape it to see. Come back Summer, maybe not the bear thou!

Anyhoo, my last post on row filling and the added requirement that I did not cover got some folks into action. Most notably, Lakshmanan and the Ice Man aka Ike Wiggins. Both of them were way ahead of me. I guess from a need, born of necessity i.e. get it done for a customer. Rather than my approach of, 'when I can find time', they have independently come up with solutions to handle the row wrapping issue I mentioned at the end of the last post.

Shout outs are due and if you use their methods, please drop a quick mail of thanks.

Lakshmanan's solution is available here. Some other great posts on EBS related tidbits (another PC'ed American term) available on his blog.

Ike's solution is available here Ike has also posted sample template and data here. Like the blog's new look and feel Ike, very suave!

Even though each of us were scheduled to be at the pod for a few hours each day, we found ourselves staying longer and longer because there were just so many folks to talk to. In fact, Glenn from Show Management came by the pod first thing this morning to tell us that the BI Publisher demopod had some pretty significant numbers the day before. We really stood out. This would explain why most of us are now losing our voices. But, that's what we get for being so excited to talk at length about our fabulous product!

Sadly, the demogrounds are now closed. But, we still have sessions tomorrow.

You won't want to miss Nick & Klaus at 12pm in Moscone West 3014. They'll be educating you on Best Practices for BI Publisher.

There are also sessions on E-Business Suite, Peoplesoft, Siebel and the last hands on JD Edwards lab. Stop by and check them out.

Siva Ramanathan from MasterCard and Noelle

gave a great session on Publisher in E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and JD Edwards World.

Siva gave a great demonstration of using the BI Publisher Template Builder. He also told the story of how it used to take a business analyst, an IT developer, and a consultant from the vendor of their 3rd party tool THREE MONTHS to create a new PO or modify an existing one (like changing the signature) - and this was happening across 50 operating units. Now, using BI Publisher, it takes a business analyst only THREE DAYS to create a new PO or implement changes and does not require the intervention of IT nor anyone else. Imagine ... 30 times faster implementation time with 1/3 the people to create or edit a Purchase Order ... Priceless.

Noelle, the superwoman of many hats, covered each Application's integration with Publisher and an update of what's new and planned for each. The audience was hanging on her every word when they weren't laughing at her jokes.

There was a little less traffic at the demo pod today ... possibly due the storm but, Fethiye, Leslie, Noelle, Alin, Klaus, Nikos and Pradeep kept the demos going all day long. And of course, Osama-bey, the inspiration behind the innovation, was there to pitch in as needed.

Also saw a presentation packed with lots of great details on using Publisher in PeopleSoft by Millie Babicz and Todd Kummer of SpearMC Consulting.

Coming up on Wednesday::

• S308767 Innovations Using Oracle XML Publisher
  Manoj Chitre, Claremont Graduate University
  Moscone West L3 Room 3005
  1:45 pm - 2:15 pm


• S310889 Creating Custom Siebel Reports, Using Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
  John Bedford, Oracle; Pradeep Sharma, Oracle
  Moscone West L2 Room 2009
  1:45 pm - 2:15 pm
  


• S311667: Modernize JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Reports with Embedded Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
  Gurbinder Bali, Oracle; Jeff Erickson, Oracle; Michael Zheng, Oracle
  Marriott Hotel Golden Gate A1
  5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
  

To convert Crystal Reports to BI Publisher, sorry, no utility here. But, check out the white paper on the OTN. We heard from Corey at Gallup today on how they were able to convert their Crystal reports to BI Publisher.

To convert Actuate Reports to BI Publisher, there's a conversion utility. Just do a search on My Oracle Support for patch # 8288024.

And now for what's coming tomorrow....

Well, if you believe the forecast, I suggest a raincoat, umbrella, galoshes...you know, those awful black rubber boats you had to wear as a kid. I hear we're in for a lot of the wet stuff. Hopefully, the anticipated precipitation doesn't stop people from making it to the session over at the Westin where we'll be talking about how E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Siebel use BI Publisher to produce those pixel perfect reports.

If you're at the Marriott, you might want to check out Paul Rodwick's session on the Oracle BI Roadmap and Strategy. Check out where Oracle BI's headed.

And, yes, there's another one of the JD Edwards hands on labs too.

If you just want to stay high and dry, come over to Moscone West and play a little golf at the Callaway Experience.

Did I mention, the BI Publisher demo pod is really, really close to the Callaway Golf Experience? No? Well, it is. We're in the back on the right, Pod W-083. Our knowledgeable BI Publisher team will be on hand to show you demos and answer your questions.