Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BI Publisher Quick Start Guide: Karen Brownfield Susan Behn
BI Publisher Quick Start Guide: Karen Brownfield Susan Behn
Overview
BI Publisher separates extracting data from the database from the presentation of that data in a report. This provides several advantages The same data file can be used for multiple reports Output can be set to be Word, PDF, Excel, XBRL, XML without changing program that extracted the data Anybody proficient in Word, Excel can design the output
The program that produces the XML file is called the Data Template. The portion of BI Publisher that takes the XML file as input and creates the report is the Report Template or Presentation Template. Since both pieces have template in the name, this can cause confusion. Any tool that can output XML can create the Data Template. This can be Oracle Reports, JDeveloper, PL/SQL etc. Data Templates can even contain embedded SQL to do further extracts. Presentation Templates cannot create XML, cannot contain SQL, and cannot add data to the template. Within limits, they can reorder the data, can reformat it, and add conditions to exclude data in the XML file. Presentation Templates can be created with common desktop tools like Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat. BI Publisher works with Office 2000, 2003 and 2007. This paper will use Microsoft Word 2007 to build the sample template. If you are using Office 2000 or 2003, the menus will be slightly different. There are three versions of BI Publisher. One version is the Desktop version, more commonly called the Template Builder. This is the add-in to Word or Adobe that allows you to build the templates. You can download the Enterprise version of the desktop BI Publisher from OTN (current version is 10.1.3.4) and use it against the E-Business Suite embedded version as long as you dont need to use pivot tables. Or you can download the E-Business Suite client side version from MetaLink. This will actually download version 10.1.3.2 of the Enterprise version. This presentation will be using the E-Business Suite BI Publisher Desktop. The other two versions reside on the database and are also called the Processing Engine. One is embedded in E-Business Suite. You may also hear this version referenced as XML Publisher or BI Publisher 5.6.3. This version of BI Publisher is included in your E-Business Suite license as long as you do not reference any custom tables or any custom columns added to Oracle tables. The second version that resides at the database level is BI Publisher Enterprise Edition. This version allows you to use any field in any table, but requires additional licensing. Whether you use the E-Business Suite embedded version or the Enterprise version, it is this processing engine that merges the XML data with the Presentation or Report Template. The following three diagrams represent how the processing engine works
Collaborate 09 - OAUG Forum Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 1 of 34
The following picture shows just a few of the formats that you can produce using the Template Builder. The Template Builder supports special formatting such as logos, charts and graphs, tables, and bar codes. It also supports the use of any special formatting offered by Word or Adobe. The Processing Engine supports multiple methods of report delivery such as print, fax, email, and web. Reports can be burst according to your defined criteria and each section delivered to a different person. BI Publisher is a tremendous improvement over the traditional method of writing and delivering reports.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 2 of 34
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 3 of 34
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 4 of 34
When the next screen appears, enter a new program name and new short name. Click Include Parameters and Include Incompatible Programs, then click OK.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 5 of 34
This will return you to the Concurrent Programs screen with your new definition. Change the Output Format to XML. Save your work noting your new Short Name. You will need it later.
Add your new Concurrent Report Definition to the appropriate Request Group. The navigation from the System Administrator responsibility is Security => Responsibility => Request. Query the appropriate group, navigate to the Requests zone and add your report.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 6 of 34
Now we need to run the report to generate a XML file for the Template Builder. After running the report, select View Output. The result will now be an XML file. Save this file to a drive where you will be able to access it from Word.
One thing that should be done is a review of the resulting XML data. Oracle may (or not) furnish the report name. Note the various data groups provided. Data groups are identified with a line that starts with a dash.
Data Group
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 7 of 34
Look also at the end of the report for fields that can be used such as the parameters and constants
Click Tools, and then select Options. Click the UI tab. Make sure Original XML Element Name is clicked.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 8 of 34
Now click the Build tab. If you want to change the default table color, click Select, then pick a new color. Note that each time you click Select, the color will return to the default color.
Notice that Abbreviated is clicked for For-each form field. You can choose this or Descriptive
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 9 of 34
To create this section, from Add-Ins, click Insert, then Table Wizard. Select Form. Note: we will use other parts of this report to demo the other choices under the Insert menu.
Select the field to group by. For this report, the top group will be the vendor number. Select the field, and then click Next.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 10 of 34
The next screen that appears lists available fields on the left. Highlight each field that is needed for the report and click the > button. Notice there are two copies of each amount field. One is prefaced FORMATTED. You can select this field and accept Oracles formatting, or you can use Word to apply your own formatting. When all the desired fields are in the column on the right, click Next.
This screen orders the data within this group. Since we are grouping by vendor, select this field first. After that, the sort order is up to the report designer. For our example we will then sort by invoice number then invoice date. After selecting all desired ordering fields, click Next.
This screen allows the designer to specify how the field will be labeled on the report. This is the last screen, so after entering all the labels, click Finish. Page 11 of 34
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
BI Publisher will drop a table at the top of our report under the header with the results. You can now apply additional formatting, such as font size and type, and/or table borders. Note that the shading for the table comes from the default specified earlier. It can be changed. In the picture below the width of the 1st column was adjusted and the alignment for the amount columns was changed to right-justified. Additionally those cells were split so that the amount would still stay close to the text identifying the amount.
For Each
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 12 of 34
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 13 of 34
Note that this form shows the groups as folders. Since the next section we wish to display is information about the invoice, scroll down until the group <G_INVOICE> appears. Drag this group to the Template zone. When the pop-up box appears, select Drop Single Node.
The designer of this report wanted to list charges for each invoice by accounting combination. This breakout doesnt appear in the Oracle designed report, but since the data is in the XML file, it can be done via BI Publisher without customizing the Oracle code. It isnt even a group, but BI Publisher allows creating new groups. So making sure Insert Position = Child, drag <C_EXP_FLEXFIELD> on top of <G_INVOICE>. Then drag the other desired fields and drop them on top of <C_EXP_FLEXFIELD>. You can now see that <C_EXP_FLEXFIELD> has just become a group. Note that the order listed will be the order shown in the report.
While we just created a new sub-group, we need to make sure that the data is ordered (sorted) by this new field within each invoice. So highlight <G_INVOICE> and look at the resulting Properties box. It will
Collaborate 09 - OAUG Forum Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 14 of 34
look like the box below on the left. Select the Sort by, Sort Order, and Sort DataType so that it looks like the box on the right.
Now highlight <C_EXP_FLEXFIELD> and note the default Properties. Again, we need to specify the next field to do ordering by. In this case, we will choose <C_LINE_NUM>. This time, however, we need to choose Numeric, not Date/Text. However, the field is grayed out and we cant change it. How to perform this change will be explained later. Just click OK.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 15 of 34
There is a table within a table. Note the G and E above and below the inner table and the F just before C_LINE_NUM and the E just after C_FORMATTED_DIST_AMT. The G and E are similar to the F and E we explained earlier. Double-click the G to see the Properties page. Then click Add Help Text to see what the G really includes.
Now well add the <C_EXP_FLEXFIELD> back. Place the cursor to the right of the G. From the Add-In menu, select Insert => Field. This opens a list of the groups and fields available in our XML file.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 16 of 34
Highlight <C_EXP_FLEXFIELD> and click Insert. The result looks like the picture below. Notice that there are no spaces between G and C_EXP_FLEXFIELD. Our designer wants this field in Italics and in Bold text, so highlight C_EXP_FLEXFIELD and use Word to set Italics and Bold.
Any field that is highlighted in gray is a placeholder for data that will actually be in the XML file. All other fields can be changed using Word standard functionality. So well change the headers, adjust the size of the table columns, and make C_LINE_NUM and C_FORMATTER_DIST_AMT right justified. Additionally, delete the space between F and C_LINE_NUM and between C_FORMATTED_DIST_AMT and E. The result will look like the following picture. Dont worry about the wrapping shown in the first column. It is unlikely that our invoice line numbers will be more than 1-4 digits.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 17 of 34
However, if you want to get a better sense of how the report will look, you can change the label for the gray-highlighted fields. Double-click the field to open the Properties page and change Default text. Below is picture how the template looks after changing Default text for C_LINE_NUM and the new Properties page for C_DIST_DESCRIPTION. You can also use Word to change the font and font size for each of these fields.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 18 of 34
Review the results and note any changes that you want. Our designer noted that the Line is sorting alphabetically instead of numerically. The designer also decided that a forced page break between each gray box would be nice.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 19 of 34
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 20 of 34
Note that the line numbers are sorted numerically and that there is no new header area on the same page (and the page count increased from 48 to 64 because of this). The change involving the currency symbol will only show when the report is run on the server as the xdo.cfg file only resides there. Page 21 of 34
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Now double-click this gray box to open the Properties page. Enter the name of the filter in Default text:. Then click Add Help Text. Click Type your own: and enter the condition in the white box. The syntax of a condition is <?if:<field_name><condition>?>. Replace <field_name> with the name of the XML field that controls the filter. Replace <condition> with the filtering condition. For our example, use <?if:C_AMOUNT_REM!=0?>. Click OK, and then click OK again.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 22 of 34
Now that we added the filter, we have to tell BI Publisher when to quit filtering by adding an End tag. We placed our filter start after the first F; therefore our filter end will be before the last E (and after the page break). Again, add a form field. To add a form field, click the Developer menu at the top of Word. Then click the Design Mode icon. When the sub-menu opens, click the Legacy Tools button. Then click the Text Form Field icon. This will result in placing an empty gray box on the template.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 23 of 34
Enter a description of the filter end in Default text:, then click Add Help Text. Click Type your own: and enter <?end if?> in the white box. Click OK, and then click OK again.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 24 of 34
Final Check
Before uploading the template to the server, make sure that the Processing Engine will not reject the template. From Add-Ins, click Tools, then Validate Template. Hopefully you will see No Error found.. However, you may see something like the following picture.
The error messages are not always helpful, but the offending text will be printed. In this case, the error was representing not equal as <>= instead of <> or !=.
Enter a name for your Data Definition. The code must match the Short Name of the Concurrent Program definition that produces the XML output. Click Apply.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 25 of 34
This will cause the form to return to a blank screen. Re-query the Data Definition just created, and then click the link under Name. Oracle allows us to load a sample XML file so that the presentation template can be tested in the definition screens.
When the next screen appears, click Update File next to Preview Data. If youve never loaded a template for this Data Definition, there will be no file listed. You can also use this screen to upload a newer version of the XML file.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 26 of 34
When the next screen appears, click the Browse button. Select the .xml file that was used to build the template. The selected file name will fill into the Preview Data box. Click Apply.
Now we need to register the Presentation Template. Click the Templates tab and click Create Template.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 27 of 34
Enter any Name, Code, and Description. You will not be able to change the Code once entered. The Data Definition must match the one just defined. Since we created our template in Word, set Type to RTF. Set Subtemplate to No. Click Browse to upload the template file from the PC file system. It will have a .rft extension. Enter Language and Territory. Click Apply.
You can now click Preview to verify the template is correct. If so, the report will show.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 28 of 34
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 29 of 34
Close the Options window and click Submit. When the report finishes click View Output.
Step 1 is to add the parameter to the Template. Return to Word. This time the parameter goes BEFORE the first F. Again, add a form field. To add a form field, click the Developer menu at the top of Word. Then click the Design Mode icon. When the sub-menu opens, click the Legacy Tools button. Then click the Text Form Field icon. This will result in placing an empty gray box on the template. Doubleclick the resulting gray field to open the Properties page. Enter a description of the filter end in Default text:, then click Add Help Text.
Collaborate 09 - OAUG Forum Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 30 of 34
Click Type your own:. This time the code for the condition requires using xsl. The xsl syntax is <xsl:param name = <parameter_name> xdofo:ctx=begin/>. Replace <parameter_name> with the name of the parameter. Remember this name. Do not use $ in the parameter name. Click OK, and then click OK again.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 31 of 34
Step 2 requires changing the condition in our form field If Amt Remaining !=0. Double-click to open the Properties page, and then click Add Help Text. Replace the current if statement with <xsl:if test= ($<parameter_name><condition><value>). The parameter must be preceded by $. The next picture shows our condition. If we answer Unpaid Invoices Only? with No, then all invoices will print. If we answer Unpaid Invoices Only? with Yes, then only invoices with a remaining value will print. Click OK, then Click OK again.
Step 3 is optional and involves adding Unpaid Invoices to the Header based on the value of the parameter. You cannot insert form fields into headers, so we must type the test directly into the header. For the header, simple If code can be used. Place <?if:$P_UNPAID=Y?> just before Unpaid Invoices and <?end if?> immediately after.
Step 4 is the registration of the parameter in the concurrent program definition. The Token used must exactly match the parameter name used in the template. And you must ensure that the selected Value Set will yield the values that are tested in the template.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 32 of 34
Step 5 involves uploading the Updated Template or creating a second template. Query the template, click Update. Use the Browse button to select our new .rft file. Click Apply.
Step 6 is to run the report. Run it with the new parameter set to both values.
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 33 of 34
This picture shows the report with Unpaid Invoices Only? set to Yes.
This picture shows the report with Unpaid Invoices Only? set to No.
Additional Resources
This just barely scratches the surface of the capabilities of BI Publisher. Visit the following for more information: OAUG Knowledge Factory contains past presentations about BI Publisher BI Publisher Blog by Tim Dexter http://blogs.oracle.com/xmlpublisher/ BI Publisher for Oracle E-Business Suite by Roel A. Hogendoorn MSC this is an excellent reference for beginners EBS Documentation o Release 11i.10.2+ Users Guide o Release 12 Administration and Developers Guide MetaLink Forums (XML and/or BI Publisher) o Soon to be Communities MetaLink Knowledge Browser (BI Publisher)
Conclusion
All these resources are great. But there is no substitute for practice. Pick the report that causes you the most pain because of its current format. Use BI Publisher to create a format you can use. And if you are running Release 11i, consider upgrading to Release 12, especially version 12.1. Oracle has already re-registered all the reports to produce XML output and created XML templates. Even if you still dont like the format, you no longer have to start from scratch. You can download Oracles template and make changes. Now, go practice!
Copyright 2009 Solution Beacon, LLC All Rights Reserved Any other commercial product names herein are trademark, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Page 34 of 34