''Oracle XML Publisher'' (XMLP) is Oracle Corporation's latest reporting technology. It was originally developed to solve the reporting problems faced by Oracle Applications. Osama Elkady from the Applications Technology Group and Tim Dexter from the Financials Group were the main drivers for the product. It was first released with

Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle Applications comprise the applications software or business software of the Oracle Corporation both in the cloud and on-premises. The term refers to the non-database and non-middleware parts. The suite of applications includes enterprise re ...

11.5.10 in 2003. Since then it has been integrated into most of Oracle Products including

JD Edwards J.D. Edwards World Solution Company or JD Edwards, abbreviated JDE, was an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company, whose namesake ERP system is still sold under ownership by Oracle Corporation. JDE's products included World for IB ...

''EnterpriseOne'' application 8.12 and

PeopleSoft PeopleSoft, Inc. is a company that provides human resource management systems (HRMS), Financial Management Solutions (FMS), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise performance management (EPM) software ...

''Enterprise'' 9, and as a standalone version, XML Publisher Enterprise with no dependency on Oracle Applications. When XML Publisher became part of the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Suite it was re-branded as Oracle BI Publisher. BI Publisher separates the creation of data from the process of formatting it for different uses. The engine can format any well-formed

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

data, allowing integration with any system that can generate XML, including Web Services or any data source available through

JDBC Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the programming language Java, which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java database connectivity. I ...

. BI Publisher can merge multiple data sources into a single output document.

Template design

BI Publisher report templates can be designed using the

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...

, Adobe Acrobat,

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for App ...

(standalone only) and Adobe Flash (standalone only). Templates created using these tools contain embedded fields with properties that determine how the XML data will be merged into the template, using

Extensible Stylesheet Language In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents. Historically, the W3C XSL Working Group produced a draft specification under the name "XSL," which ...

syntax to precisely match the server's engine.

Template Builder for Word

Template Builder is an extension to

that simplifies the development of Rich Text Format templates. Templates created using Template Builder are transformed into XSL Stylesheets that can be used to generate PDF, RTF,

and

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

outputs.

Layout Editor

Starting with the 11g release, BI Publisher also offers a pure web based layout editor that allows users to create management reports and simple production reports in a WYSIWYG layout editor. The layout editor is written in pure DHTML. As with Rich Text Format templates Reports created in the web based layout editor are transformed into XSL stylesheets and can be viewed in the same output formats. In addition, the layout editor templates (.xpt) can also be viewed in an interactive viewer which allows re-sorting and interactive filtering of existing reports.

Adobe Acrobat

XML Publisher templates can be designed in Adobe Acrobat 5.00 and above, using the native form field capabilities.

Adobe Flash

The 10.1.3.3 release of Oracle BI Publisher offers support for Adobe Corporation's new document format for building interactive forms and reports, called Flex. You can build Flex templates, test them on your desktop, and deploy them to the BI Publisher server to generate Flash output. Users are then able to run the reports from the BI Publisher user interface or schedule them for delivery to report consumers.

XSL Stylesheet

In addition to using the tools mentioned above, users can also upload existing XSL stylesheets to run with BI Publisher.

Data Template/Model design

BI Publisher supports the generation of XML data from SQL queries, web services, XML files and XML HTTP servers, LDAP queries, MDX queries (starting 10.1.3.4.1), Oracle ADF view objects (11g) and Microsoft EXCEL files (11g). While previous version allowed the simple addition through a UI, linking of queries required the creation of an XML configuration file. In 11g the data model can be created using a web based visual data model builder.

Server

The server is a

Java EE Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web ser ...

application that can be deployed to any Java EE container. The XML data is fed through the templates to produce

XSL Formatting Objects XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is a markup language for XML document formatting that is most often used to generate PDF files. XSL-FO is part of Extensible Stylesheet Language, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), a set of W3C technologies design ...

, which can be transformed into most popular output formats: *

Portable Document Format Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating syste ...

* Rich Text Format *

* PPT *

Flash Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional aliases * Flash (DC Comics character), several DC Comics superheroes with super speed: ** Flash (Barry Allen) ** Flash (Jay Garrick) ** Wally West, the first Kid F ...

* Plain Text (e.g. EFT/ EDI)

Delivery Manager

The Delivery Manager is responsible to deliver the output to different destinations, such as fax and email, with the flexibility of delivering the same output to different destinations; e.g. HTML format can be sent to email while a PDF format sent to the printer. The following protocols are supported: *

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients ty ...

Internet Printing Protocol The Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) is a specialized Internet protocol for communication between client devices (computers, mobile phones, tablets, etc.) and printers (or print servers). It allows clients to submit one or more print jobs to the p ...

(IPP) *

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for con ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

* SFTP *

AS2 AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) is a specification on how to transport structured business-to-business data securely and reliably over the Internet. Security is achieved by using digital certificates and encryption. Background AS2 was created ...

The Delivery Manager provides an open architecture that allows custom delivery channels to be implemented.

References

External links

Official Oracle Page

Official Blog

Official Youtube Channel

Official Facebook Page

Official Twitter Account
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