BI Publisher earlier called XML Publisher, is now part of Business Intelligence products of oracle apps. BI Publisher is a reporting tool, with flexibility in handling various aspects of report building, both by developer and by the product. Prior to BI Publisher reports, Oracle reports was used, which was a traditional method of manufacturing reports. With BI its just a matter of fitting pieces that makes bulk report generation lot easier. For an end user, the flow does not change a bit. Example user submits (in oracle apps) a concurrent program with parameters. A pdf output is generated. There is no change here, and the product already started with a good score in evaluation.
There are some minor changes in setup. For concurrent program a particular executable name should be used or using a matching short name, and setting output to XML. A data definition need to be setup for the source query, and many templates can be setup for output format. Each template can be specified with multiple language formats. These give options to scale a single data source into multiple presentations in various languages. Any day, the data definition, template or language translations may be used in a different manner by minor tweaking. BI Publisher allows to develop various kinds of reports by single product, easy to maintain setup of source and formats. This greatly reduces the maintenance and expertise cost for integration.
BI Publisher Report developer can easily code the data source as XML, execute triggers, and accept parameters from concurrent program. The presentation template could be an RTF with customized logo, or an org specific logo, complex layouts cab be designed as per MS word capabilities, table rows or values conditionally formatted, headers and footers included. And you need not know XML to come up with a simple report.
BI Publisher is a java based tool, using XML data. At the end of process is a delivery manager that can send prepared document for purpose printing, distribution via emails or to fax. Some modules of oracle apps use java concurrent program, which calls XML Publisher specific Java APIs, to manually read data (example based on PL/SQL), then prepare XML on the fly or fetch from CLOB table columns, fetch a template, generate PDF using the XML data and template. Finally a delivery of the document can be done to finish the process.
There are some minor changes in setup. For concurrent program a particular executable name should be used or using a matching short name, and setting output to XML. A data definition need to be setup for the source query, and many templates can be setup for output format. Each template can be specified with multiple language formats. These give options to scale a single data source into multiple presentations in various languages. Any day, the data definition, template or language translations may be used in a different manner by minor tweaking. BI Publisher allows to develop various kinds of reports by single product, easy to maintain setup of source and formats. This greatly reduces the maintenance and expertise cost for integration.
BI Publisher Report developer can easily code the data source as XML, execute triggers, and accept parameters from concurrent program. The presentation template could be an RTF with customized logo, or an org specific logo, complex layouts cab be designed as per MS word capabilities, table rows or values conditionally formatted, headers and footers included. And you need not know XML to come up with a simple report.
BI Publisher is a java based tool, using XML data. At the end of process is a delivery manager that can send prepared document for purpose printing, distribution via emails or to fax. Some modules of oracle apps use java concurrent program, which calls XML Publisher specific Java APIs, to manually read data (example based on PL/SQL), then prepare XML on the fly or fetch from CLOB table columns, fetch a template, generate PDF using the XML data and template. Finally a delivery of the document can be done to finish the process.
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