Excel with Xpath

Xpath is a bit like a ladder: it’s fairly simple in itself, but it enables you to do things you probably wouldn’t even think of trying without it.  That’s what we discovered anyway, when we were asked to replicate some Oracle reports in Excel via BI Publisher templates.

You may be familiar with the way that Oracle’s default plain text output looks: it’s set up so that the page width is not exceeded, allowing for straightforward printouts.  However, what if you’re not primarily interested in printing a particular report, but would like to run some analysis on it instead?  Using a BI Publisher template is the obvious answer for redirecting the report data away from the Notepad dead-end and channelling it towards the Excel information powerhouse.

But if you’re going to send data to Excel, why keep it in a page-width-bound structure that cages it from Excel’s analytical power?  Well, because without Xpath, you wouldn’t even think of trying to open it all up!  Xpath, a simple query language that interacts with XML documents, releases your data to Excel’s powers, freeing the layout of your report from the hierarchy of its source XML file.  It allows you to completely “flatten” the structure so that data from the innermost XML element to the most distant ancestral node can all be placed on a single line of your report.  No more tables within tables: just one simple, wide, analysis-inviting table.

That’s not the only way that our use of Xpath helps us exceed our customer’s expectations.  Employing Xpath to flatten the report structure makes it super simple for us to produce a stack of reports in an impressively small amount of time!  So not only are we able to deliver reports that can do a lot more than a customer might ask for, we can achieve this more efficiently than anyone trying to replicate Oracle’s standard layout in a BI Publisher template.  You can check the results at www.BIPtemplates.com .

BI Publisher is an incredible tool for making Oracle reports come alive, but there’s another whole level of functionality that you could not even think of trying if it weren’t for Xpath!

This entry was posted on 09/01/2010 at 12:17 am 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.

| Print