Oracle XML Publisher is a template-based publishing solution delivered with the Oracle E-Business Suite. It provides a new approach to report design and publishing by integrating familiar desktop word processing tools with existing E-Business Suite data reporting.
XML Publisher leverages standard, well-known technologies and tools, so you can rapidly develop and maintain custom report formats. The flexibility of XML Publisher is a result of the separation of the presentation of the report from its data structure. The collection of the data is still handled by the E-Business Suite, but now you can design and control how the report outputs will be presented in separate template files At run-time XML Publisher merges your designed template files with the report data to create a variety of outputs to meet a variety of business needs, including -:
- Customer-ready PDF documents such as financial statements, marketing materials, contracts, invoices, purchase orders utilizing colors, images, font styles, headers and footers, many other formatting and design options.
- HTML output for optimum online viewing.
- Excel output to create a spreadsheet of your report data.
- "Filled-out" third-party provided PDF documents. You can download a PDF document, such as a government form, to use as a template for your report. At run-time, the data and template produce a "filled-out" form.
- Flat text files to exchange with business partners for EDI and EFT transmission.
Image XML-1
XML Publisher Desktop Components
XML Publisher provides components that you can install on your desktop to facilitate template development.
The Template Builder is an extension to Microsoft Word that simplifies the development of RTF templates. It automates many of the manual steps that would otherwise be required.
The Template Viewer is a Java application that facilitates the rapid development of templates by providing advanced preview capabilities for all template types.
Note: XML support MS-word 2000 and later versions
Process Overview
Creating customized reports using XML Publisher can be divided into two phases -:
Design
- Register the concurrent request as a data definition using XML Publisher template manager
- Design the Template as per your report requirements
- Register the Template in the XML publisher using template manager
Run-Time
- Select the report concurrent program to generate the XML output
- Run the concurrent program using standard request submission
Oracle XML Publisher Architecture
Image XML-2
Advantages of XML Publisher
Accepts XML data from Various Data sources
- XML Publisher accepts systematic data generated from various sources such as RDF,PL/Sql, etc,
- XML Publisher also accepts Data from Multiple sources and can be used in same Template for building the Report
Delivers Data to many Output Sources
- Data can be delivered to Various Sources such as E-mail, Fax, Printer, Etc,.
Various User friendly Features/Flexibility
- Various Fonts can be used
- Report can be generated in various Languages and territories
- Reports can be generated to various Formats such as PDF, RTF, HTML and EXCEL,.
- Various design tools can be used to format the Layouts
Meet complete business requirements with reduced complexity
Reduce maintenance & cost
Performance and Scalability
Security -
XML Publisher allows the user to produce secure PDF output, with security levels covering:
- Read Only/Editable
- Copy Text
- Printable
- Password Protection
Multiple Languages - 185 languages and 244 territories (ISO Standards)
To summarize, all parties win from report developers to the end user when using Oracle BI Publisher.
End User – The end user is presented with a richer report offering from the e-Business Suite. Reports in multiple formats with multiple delivery options are now available directly from the applications suite; the language and locale options have been improved and this all comes through a consistent user interface.
Business Consultant – traditionally the business consultant would gather the business requirements and then describe the report that was required in a document and pass this to the IT consultant for implementation. The business consultant now has a set of familiar desktop applications that can be used to design the report format itself, this will ensure the report will meet all the business requirements that are in scope and it will look exactly as the consultant has designed it.
IT Consultant – the IT consultant will now receive a document that is the actual report format as designed by the business consultant. The time to develop, deploy and test will be greatly reduced; the cost of on going maintenance will also be reduced.
Development – are now able to focus on generating XML data from the e-Business Suite schema to satisfy multiple requirements, now development is free from ‘1 data definition : 1 report layout’ there is a move toward generating larger data engines that can satisfy a larger requirement set. This will provide end users with far greater choice and control over the content of the reports they want to see from the suite.
Performance and Scalability - The XSL-FO engine that has been developed is not only robust but also fast, this is vital. XML data by its nature generates large objects or files and these can cause serious memory issues during processing. BI Publisher has a stream based implementation that reduces this memory
footprint allowing large XML input files to be processed.
