Oracle ebs Operating Reporting with BI Publisher. Miroslav Samoilenko. Claremont is a trading name of Premiertec Consulting Ltd

Transcription

1 Oracle ebs Operating Reporting with BI Publisher Claremont is a trading name of Premiertec Consulting Ltd

2 Oracle ebs Operating Reporting with BI Publisher The Oracle ebusiness Suite produces a significant amount of operating data. Receivable transactions, projects expenditure items, and lease contracts stream elements add thousands of rows into database tables each day. Because of the sheer volume of data, it is a common practice to run enterprise reports off a data warehouse. The data warehouse eases the workload, on both the Oracle ebusiness Suite application and the database servers, that is caused by reports. There are also operating reports which have to be run off the Oracle ebusiness Suite database. These reports cannot wait for days till the data becomes available in the data warehouse. The list of such reports includes invoices, customer statements, cheques, dunning letters, etc. These are the customer facing reports which need to be available upon request with the most current data. What are the tools available to deliver operating reports? Historically, the only tool available in the Oracle ebusiness Suite for operating reports was Oracle Reports. An Oracle Reports Server built into the Oracle ebusiness Suite produces text reports. The presentation of these reports has been acceptable because it has been assumed that the output is invariably printed on paper, and in most cases on pre-printed forms. Oracle ebusiness Suite Operating Reporting with XML Business requirements, the development of Internet and changes to printing devices have put Oracle Reports under fire. What is the solution if the customer has signed up for electronic customer statements? What is the solution if different customers want different layouts for the same report? What is the solution if the pre-printed form is not available for the customer facing report? In response, Oracle has introduced BI Publisher. BI Publisher is a Java engine which consumes XML messages and transforms them into an output in a wide selection of formats. You can build transformation templates using MS Word documents, XSL or XSL-FO documents. Your output can be HTML, PDF, MS Word and Excel documents, or etext documents for bank exchanges.

3 The engine has the ability to , print, or fax the produced output. BI Publisher gives you the full power of the Java programming language for data and output manipulation. Reports, just like any other long running process, are exposed to the end user of Oracle ebusiness Suite via concurrent programs. In order to execute a report, the user needs to submit a concurrent request representing this report to the concurrent manager. The concurrent manager decides when to execute the request, given the requested execution schedule and work load of the database. The concurrent manager calls the Oracle Reports Server to execute the requested report. Once the Oracle Reports Server finishes execution of the report, the concurrent manager calls a set of post processors which complete the execution. One of the most common standard post processor is printing of the output. In the Oracle ebusiness Suite, BI Publisher is now available as a standard post processor for a concurrent program. The concurrent manager automatically routs the output of a BI Publisher enabled concurrent program to the BI Publisher Engine for processing. It also substitutes the output of the concurrent program with an output generated by the BI Publisher. Because of this substitution the user never sees the XML message which the concurrent program produced. Working with Oracle BI Publisher Using Oracle Reports as the only reporting tool for the Oracle ebusiness Suite demands various skill sets from a technical consultant. The consultant should have core knowledge of database tables, building effective queries and data model structuring, as well as to be able to lay out fields on an 80 character wide screen. The combination of both skills, i.e. intimate knowledge of the data structure and a graphic artist s ability of building report layouts, requires significant training and experience. Though Oracle Reports separate the construction of a data model from the presentation layouts, having both of these components in one physical file makes it impractical to have two people with separate skill sets work on the same report. All of this has changed with the arrival of BI Publisher. The tool enforces the clean separation of data extract procedures from the building of the layouts.

4 One team can concentrate on building effective data extract processes, while another team of graphic artists can work on laying the data on the canvas and standardising the look and feel for corporate reports. Since BI Publisher can present data in a wide variety of formats, such as RTF, PDF, HTML and Excel, the role of a graphic artist becomes more important than it is for developing traditional Oracle Reports. The graphic artists should now not only lay out the data elements to dump data to the end user, but also ensure the data is presented in a way which enforces its best understanding by the end user. How Can I Access BI Publisher? There is a standard concurrent request Post Processor for BI Publisher. This Post Processor is engaged when the concurrent program is registered as a data source with BI Publisher. The concurrent manager automatically routs the output of the concurrent program to the BI Publisher for processing using the specified template.

5 There is also a standard Java concurrent program XML Report Publisher which allows you to apply a BI Publisher template to the output of a concurrent request. This program is useful when you want to apply a different BI Publisher template to complete a concurrent request, especially if the concurrent request takes a significant amount of time to execute. The standard definition restricts the list of eligible concurrent requests and templates, however, you can change the definition to loosen up the restrictions. This concurrent program is the only out-of-the-box tool which allows you to enable customer statements and cheques for BI Publisher. You can invoke the BI Publisher Engine from a Java concurrent program. You call the method; oracle.apps.xdo.oa.schema.server.templatehelper.processtemplate(string applicationshortname, String templatecode, Reader inputstream, byte outputtype, Properties properties, OutputStream binaryoutput) passing the short application name and template name, and the reader for the inbound XML message. This method calls the BI Publisher Engine to apply the template to the XML message and returns the binary stream containing the result of the transformation. Stand Alone BI Publisher for Operating Reports XML processing is an expensive procedure. BI Publisher needs to load the entire XML document into memory to build DOM structure and apply the template to it. This consumes a significant amount of memory and processing power. An alternative solution is to use a standalone BI Publisher for operating reports. One of Claremont s extensions for the Oracle ebusiness Suite exposes the concurrent manager as a Web Service using the Oracle BPEL Engine. This extension submits concurrent requests and waits for their completion, returning the output of the concurrent request. The combination of this extension with the Oracle BPEL Engine scheduling and Oracle BI Publisher processing capabilities allows you to build real time operating reports with minimum workload on an Oracle ebusiness Suite production database.

6 Summary Oracle BI Publisher is the tool of choice for operating reporting from the Oracle ebusiness Suite. The availability of the tool as embedded into the Oracle ebusiness Suite as well as a standalone, allows you to utilise the same skill set to build a wide variety of reports. You can use the same familiar tool to read data not only from Oracle ebusiness Suite, but also from any other data sources available in the enterprise.