Java Reporting Software

Oracle BI Publisher

Software Synopsis (reprinted courtesy of Wikipedia):

Oracle XML Publisher (XMLP) is Oracle Corporation's new reporting technology. It was originally developed to solve the reporting problems faced by Oracle Applications. It was first released with Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 in 2003. Since then it has been integrated into JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application 8.12 and Peoplesoft Enterprise 9, and as a standalone version, XML Publisher Enterprise with no dependency on Oracle Applications.

XML Publisher can format any well-formed XML data, allowing integration with any system that can generate XML, including Web Services or any data source available though JDBC. XML Publisher can merge multiple data sources into a single output document.

BI Publisher Interface

Template Design

XML Publisher report templates can be designed using Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Excel (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 syntax to precisely match the server's engine.

Template Builder

Template Builder is an extension to Microsoft Word that simplifies the development of Rich Text Format templates. Templates created using Template Builder can be used to generate PDF, RTF, Microsoft Excel and HTML outputs.

Adobe Acrobat

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

Microsoft Excel

The standalone or Enterprise version of BI Publisher includes an Excel Analyzer that enables you to download report data to Excel, manipulate and format the data in Excel, then upload the Excel file as a template.

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.

Server

It is a Java EE application that can be deployed to any Java EE container. The XML data is fed through the templates to produce XSL Formatting Objects, which can be transformed into most popular output formats:

Portable Document Format
Rich Text Format
HTML
PPT
Flash
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.

SMTP
Internet Printing Protocol (IPP)
WebDAV
FTP
SFTP
AS2

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

Visit the official Oracle BI Publisher Website.

Reviews

White Papers

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