An Oracle blog about BI Publisher
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RTF
September 10, 2010
Anatomy of a Template Reprise
Some of you may have caught the Kevin and Tim show on Wednesday. We did two shows the first, which not many of you caught, at 4am mountain time. The second was at 12pm Mountain.
It was a presentation on more advanced aspects of template building. It was based around the three Anatomy of Template posts I wrote a few years back.
Anatomy of a Template I - Fixed Row Enumeration
Anatomy of a Template II - Headers and Filler
Anatomy of a Template III - Page Totals and Last Page
I added a few bits to the template, barcodes, terms and conditions, etc and walked through those.
Hopefully the second session got recorded successfully. The first was a wash, Im not good at 4am anyway. I'm amazed I strung words together in coherent sentences, well I assume I did.
The recording for this session and all of the other Advisor sessions are available via Note 1155653.1.
The template I worked through and some data is available
..During the Q&A, someone asked for an XSL book recommendation. Rather glibly I replied that I did not like books. That was not meant in a general burn all books sense. More, that I do not like tech books, they are expensive and out of date in 6 months when you need to shell out another $60 to catch up ... hey I need to get on that band wagon!
Rather than a book, google is my friend and when it comes to XSL. Dave Pawson's web" site in the UK is a gold mine of tips and tricks to get you started.
While chatting to Kevin; who I have not seen for a long time in person he mentioned a relatively new BIP/XMLP support community that he and his team watch over.
https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt/community/bi_publisher/323
Well worth checking out if you have a question for support that will help you avoid logging an SR. As an incentive, if you would like the slides from Wednesday. You need to get on over to the link above, under the 'BI Publisher All Community Documents ' you will find the Anatomy of a Template slide deck.
Kevin and Philippe (XMLP/BIP support director) are planning more sessions in the coming months. Both from their team and the BIP development and product management organization. Keep an eye out for announcements.
Where can we get the RTF?
Thanks.
If this isn't the right blog or forum please point me in the right direction. We are using a 3rd party product to produce customer facing documents in 11i. The reason for this is we take the unmodified XML output from .rdf reports e.g. Sales Order Ackknowledgement (OEXOEACK) and supplement it with more data from the 11i instance before creating the customer facing document.
We would like to use BI Publisher instead of the the 3rd party application. We recently asked Oracle Support if we could dynamically fetch information when the document is created using BI Publisher and the response was we could not. We've not seen documentation that states it can be done but thought we would ask someone with in-depth experience with the product. Thanks...
I have a two levels within my detail section, for which I use nested for-each statements. Unfortunately the logic no longer works as position() returns the wrong value as it re-sets for each group.
[Product_Group] (position()=1)
[Invoice_Line] (position()=1)
[Line Number]1.000[/Line_Number]
[Quantity]37.00[/Quanity]
.
.
[/Invoice_Line]
[Invoice_Line] (position()=2)
[Line Number]2.000[/Line_Number]
[Quantity]82.00[/Quanity]
.
.
[/Invoice_Line]
[Invoice_Line] (position()=3)
[Line Number]4.000[/Line_Number]
[Quantity]2.00[/Quanity]
.
.
[/Invoice_Line]
.
.
[/Product_Group]
[Product_Group] (position()=2)
[Invoice_Line] (position()=1)
[Line Number]1.000[/Line_Number]
[Quantity]12.00[/Quanity]
.
.
[/Invoice_Line]
[Invoice_Line] (position()=2)
[Line Number]2.000[/Line_Number]
[Quantity]8.00[/Quanity]
.
.
[/Invoice_Line]
.
.
[/Product_Group]