Data Templates

Most EBS BI Publisher users limit themselves to the data in existing concurrent requests. Data templates open the world to you by enabling you to report on anything in the EBS database. This article explains what data templates are compared with “presentation templates”

Presentation Templates

I recently coined the phrase “presentation” templates to refer to the RTF files created to transform the output from the standard Oracle reports (i.e. the presentation layer). It’s what most people will use to transform their existing 11i reports and what R12 users will recognise as the new way to produce standard Oracle reports output. Presentation templates merely reformat the data which is created from a standard concurrent request. Although when I say “merely reformat” – that’s an understatement. Presentation templates are very powerful because you can do almost anything with data which is generated from the original concurrent request (e.g. sorting, summing, providing graphs, charts, tables, conditional formatting). Here’s an example of what could be done straight off the back of a bog standard concurrent request).

However, have you ever wondered why there’s another tab on the XML publisher administrator, which doesn’t seem to do much at all except tell BI Publisher which concurrent request we are getting the data from?

Data Templates

The data definition tab is there to allow us to create our own data extraction query (or data layer), as a data template. You can also emulate all the Oracle Reports functionality, including parameters and triggers). This shouldn’t be a surprise to us, because of course, BI Publisher was designed to replace Oracle Reports, so there has to be a way of creating our own data layer.

The best way to create a data template is to copy the elements from an existing (Oracle Reports 6i or 10g) report. Moreover one of the most popular applications of the data template is to combine the data layer from several existing reports into one concurrent request. For example, we created at CIS letter by combining the SQL for the CIS statement with suppliers address (how cool is that?).

The data template consists of:

• A <parameters> section in which parameters are declared in child <parameter> elements
• A <dataQuery> section in which the SQL queries are defined in child <sqlStatement> elements
• A <dataStructure> section in which the output XML structure is defined

This blog post concentrates on the “what” not on the “how”. If you want more detail on the how, drop me a line.

This entry was posted on 03/08/2009 at 04:30 pm and is filed under BI Publisher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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