Oracle BI Publisher Blog

No, BIP has not become the ulltimate Oracle able to answer multiple questions - those of you using the BIEE/BIP integration will hopefully have noticed and read about the ability to pull an Answer, a BIEE report object if you will, into BIP as a datasource that you can now format using a publisher template.

What you may not have noticed is that you can pull multiple Answers into a single BIP report and create a template over the top of the combined data set. To achieve it we take advantage of the Concatenate Datasource functionality. All we need do it create multiple Answer based data sources:

then use the UI at the Data  Model level of the report tree and select 'Concatenated SQL Data Source'

 ... before you point out a problem. It's not one,  just an oversight on our part - I know you do not have SQL datasources but ignore that, we will concatenate your Answers into a single XML source.

another Easter Egg if you will.

We released a patch on Friday that addresses a few issues and enhancements:

5162352 - CHUNKEND AND ROW-SPAN NOT WORKING CORRECTLY
6270261 - ER: RTF OUTPUT TO SUPPORT SET TABLE HEADER REPEAT, TABLE ROW KEEP-TOGETHER
6527712 - PROBLEM EXECUTING A REPORT CONTAINING DATE PARAMETERS
6639103 - SUPPORT FOR THE ATTRIBUTE "VERTICAL-ALIGN" FOR FO:INLINE OR FO:EXTERNAL-GRAPHICS
6640463 - WANT MULTIPLE CURRENCY SYMBOLS IN THE SAME REPORT BASED ON ISO CODE IN XML
6677825 - IMPROPER  BEHAVIOR OF DATA TEMPLATE WHEN TWO IMAGE BLOBS RETURNED IN SAME QUERY
6706026 - USERNAMES CONVERTED TO LOWER CASE
6752693 - AERS: BIP REPORT: LONG STRING WITH NO WHITESPACE
6762580 - STANDARD RTF SYNTAX 'KEEP' DELETED BY BI PUBLISHER
6849152 - SECTION 508 ERRORS
6855842 - XDOFX TO_DATE FUNCTION PRINTS FEBRARY INSTEAD OF FEBRUARY
6886873 - AFTER CLICKING ON THE EXPORT BUTTON THE PROTOCOL SWITCHES FROM HTTPS TO HTTP
6897095 - HOW TO HIDE/DISABLE "LINK TO THIS REPORT" HYPERLINK

There are a couple in there especially the second and last ones that I have seen asked about on forums. Get your patch 'ere guv'nor!

6906492  UPDATE FOR BI PUBLISHER ENTERPRISE 10.1.3.3.2

Application instructions in the readme.

I have been working on a lot of BIP/BIEE integrations lately. One thing that has come up which the Oracle by Example for BIEE/BIP training does not cover is the case where I want my BIP report to be driven by parameters from within a BIEE dashboard page.

Something like this:

Its a simple report requiring just a single parameter but how do I get a BIEE prompt to be passed through to the BIP server?
It's pretty simple really, first off you need to create the BIP report with the parameters defined, no need for LOVs, unless you want to run the report from the BIP interface too. Once you have the report defined it's then a case of setting up the dashboard page prompts.

The trick is to create a presentation variable associated with the prompt that exactly matches the BIP report parameter name, in this example its p_student_id.

You can create as many prompts as you have BIP parameters and of course you can create cascading values for the dashboard prompt list of values.
Now when the report renders you will have dashboard prompts for your users to select from and then hit Go to refresh the report data.

Don't panic, we're not turning into a BIEE blog, I have been doing dome work with it lately and could not find the following nugget out there. Colleagues on an internal list helped out with my request - it was a simple one but I wanted to record it for posterity.

As many of you have seen you can generate totals and sub-totals in your BIP templates quite easily, you can also embed fields into the total label text.

To get the customers name in the total text, its just a case of copy and pasting the customer name field into the table cell.

I needed to do the same in a BIEE pivot table. Not quite so obvious but doable, once I got some help from my friends, ooooh I get by with a little help from my friends ... danged Guitar Hero! I dont even like the Beatles, for a Brit, sacrilege I know.

Building out the pivot you can see that if you set a total for the group you get XXXXX Total.

the dialog to customize the total string is tucked away a little. Click the total icon again and select Format Labels

This will pop the dialog

You can now enter the text you want, the '@' character will be replaced at runtime with the actual group value.

The pivot now renders with the required text.