Recent Posts by Tim Dexter

We have moved to a new blogging platform. This was a post from Pradeep that missed the cut over ... In release 12.2.1.1, BI Publisher added a new feature - Delivery to Oracle Document Cloud Services (ODCS). Around the same time, BI Publisher was also certified against JCS 12.2.1.x and therefore, today if you have hosted your BI Publisher instance on JCS then we recommend Oracle Document Cloud Services as the delivery channel. Several reasons for this: Easy to configure...

The last part on maps, I promise ... its been a fun ride for me at least :0) If you need to catch up on previous episodes: BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up II BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up III BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up IV In this post we're looking at map quality. On the left a JPG map, to the right an SVG output. If we ignore the fact that they have different levels of features or layers. Imagine getting the maps into a PDF and then printing them. Its pretty clear...

We had a couple of requests for some help this past week with customers' custom font encoders. With 11g/12c BIP its not straightforward to embed your code with the BIP code. In fact; its really simple but it took me a while and some trial and error to get the encoder classes to the right spot and in the right format so that BIP could 'see' and use them. In 11g/12c the BIP application is exploded out under the servers below the DOMAIN_HOME, in my 11.1.1.7.x install...

A while back I wrote up a how to on 2D barcode formats. I kept things generic and covered the basics of getting the barcodes working.  Tony over in Bahrain (for we are truly international :) has had a tough time getting it working under EBS. Mostly to do with the usual bug bear of the JAVA_TOP, XX_TOP and getting class paths set up. Its finally working and Tony wanted to share a document on the 'how' to get PDF417s working under EBS. Document available here. Thanks for sharing...

This week, orphaned table rows and how to avoid them. Its a bit more subtle than rows breaking across a page border and the solution is a doozy! Im using another video to demonstrate because I don't have to type and grab screen shots, even thou I have one above Its faster and more easily understood, even in my umming and erring English. I'm hip and happening and video help is the future kids! You get to hear my Southern (England) drawl; a great sleep aid for insomniacs! Here it is....

I have taken to recording screen grabs to help some folks out on 'how do I' scenarios. Sometimes a 3 minute video saves a couple of thousand words and several screen shots. So, per chance you need to know: 1. How to add a page border to your output and/or 2. How to add an under line that runs across the page Watch this!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UcXHeSF0BM If you need the template, sample data and output, get them here. I'm taking requests if you have them.

I have just spent an hour or so working on getting a sample scheduleReport web service working with parameter values. There are a lot of examples out there but none I have found have the parameters being set. Our doc is a little light on details on how to set them up :) In lieu of that, here's this! // Set the parameter values for the report. In this example we have // 'dept' and 'emp' parameters. We could easily query the params dynamically //Handle...

An email came in this morning to an internal mailing list, We have an Essbase customer with some reporting requirements and we are evaluating BI Publisher as the potential solution. I'd like to ask for your help with any document, blog or white paper with guidelines about using BI Publisher with Essbase as the main data source. Is there any tutorial showing how to use BI Publisher with Essbase as the main data source? There is not one to my knowledge but trying to be helpful I...

Another messaging exchange last week with Leslie ... OK, so we practised it a bit after our first convo and things got a little cheesy but hopefully you get the message. Hit this link and you too can give some constructive feedback on the Oracle doc for BI (not just BIP.) I took the survey; its only eight questions or more if you want to share more of your input. Please take a couple of minutes to help us shape the documentation of future.