Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I said the other week, when I wrote the first

two

articles about XML Publisher 5.6 Enterprise, that’d I’d come back in a few
days to report on how straightforward it was to put together more complicated
reports. I’ve been delayed since then by putting together the OTN article on XML
Publisher but it’s given me a good opportunity to put the product through it’s
paces. I’ve not had the chance to try out everything I wanted to but I’ve got a
good idea now of how the product hangs together.

I’m my posting

"XML Publisher 5.6 Enterprise : Producing My First Reports" I went through
the process of firstly defining a template based on XML data, and then a
template based on an SQL query. I then deployed the SQL-based template, together
with the .xdo file that the SQL Report Wizard had created, to XML Publisher 5.6
Enterprise where I then viewed it. I wasn’t able to get the XML-based report to
deploy as it had to run against an XML file accessed via HTTP or a Web Service,
neither of which I had handy, and I wasn’t quite sure how you went about
generating the .xdo file for the XML template, which was generated for you
automatically for SQL queries by the Report Wizard.

What I know now is this: for SQL-based reports, you can generate both the
template file, and the .xdo file that brings together the template, the data
source, translations and parameters, using the Report Wizard. This wizard
creates all of the files for you and places them in a directory on the filesystem. The wizard then gives you a default template layout which you can
then reformat, change the colours and fonts, add additional charts or indeed
additional tables or text areas.

If you want to upload
this report to XML Publisher Enterprise 5.6, you then go into the XML Publisher
5.6 Web interface and then firstly upload the .xdo file, and then the template
file (below). When you’ve done this you can then run the report from your Web
browser.

With XML-based
reports, it’s a slightly different process. You firstly lay out your template
file as before, but using an extract of the XML document that you will
eventually run the report against. The idea here is that you obtain an extract
with say 50 customers in it, or 50 products, or something like that, and lay the
report template items out against that. Then, after you’ve saved the template
file to the filesystem, you go into XML Publisher 5.6 Enterprise and use the Web
interface to create your report (below).

What you’re doing
here is creating what will become your .xdo file - but at this point it’s empty.
You then go into the Edit option for the report and specify the data source
(which is the actual XML feed, not the extract file you built the template
from), upload the template file you created earlier, and define any parameters
and lists of values.

You can make this whole process a
bit more integrated by creating a WebDAV folder over the directory in your
application server that XML Publisher 5.6 Enterprise saves it’s report
definitions and template files to, and using that as the place where you save
your template files and .xdo files when you use the Microsoft Word Add-in. Once
you’ve figured all of this out, it’s fairly simple to build and run most kinds
of reports.

Once or twice I got execution
errors when trying to run reports for the first time, and the error message that
XML Publisher comes up with is fairly vague and non-committal ("The
report cannot be rendered because of an error, please contact the
administrator."). The way to find out what’s really happened is to enable
debugging output on the J2EE application server that’s running XML Publisher, to
do this you need to edit the
xmlp-server-config.xml file under
j2ee\home\applications\xmlpserver\xmlpserver\WEB-INF and update the
DEBUG_LEVEL to
ERROR, then
bounce the application. From that point on you can refer to the Java stack trace
to work out what’s gone wrong.

I had a go at putting together a dashboard in the same
style as the demo
one provided by Oracle and I had mixed success. By dissecting the template
file provided by Oracle it became clear that the basis of the template was built
using Microsoft Word, with the page orientation set to landscape and the page
size set a bit wider than normal. It became clear though after a bit of playing
around that this sort of report requires you to step outside of the Word
template wizards and start coding in the markup language that XML Publisher
comes with - XML Publisher has an RTF Template Parser that takes tags and markup
language that you either generate automatically using the Word add-in, or code
yourself, and turns this into XSL-FO which then gets rendered by the XML
Publisher reporting engine. From speaking to the product guys, whilst the
dashboard is more than do-able it’s not something you’d normally put together
using Word, it’s more of an experienced user task where you understand the tags
and markup language that XML Publisher uses.

I was able to test out the online running of the XML-based
reports by copying the XML extract file into the
\j2ee\home\applications\xmlpserver\xmlpserver
directory of the application server, and then referencing it via a

http://localhost:8888/xmlpserver/InvoiceListing.xml URL. I haven’t tried out
accessing data via a Web Service but I’m sure I could knock something up via
JDeveloper or PL/SQL if needed.

One final thing that I found fairly impressive was the
security and scheduling. I won’t go into too much detail as it’ll spoil the OTN
article but it was very straightforward to create users (although not tied in
with SSO users), assign them to roles and then grant access to folders to these
roles. One gotcha was that access is granted to folders, not reports, and
therefore you have to put all reports with the same access profile into a
folder, or sub-folders within other folders, to create granular access to data.

Anyway, hopefully the article should be out in a month or
so to correspond with the full production release. That’s it for me for XML
Publisher for a while, on to Oracle Warehouse Builder next…

Posted in Oracle Reports & XML Publisher |