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Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher User's Guide
Release 10.1.3.2.0
Part Number B40017-01
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Misc

Introduction

BI Publisher's bursting feature enables you to generate

BI Publisher's bursting engine accepts a data stream and splits it based on multiple criteria, generates output based on a template, then delivers the individual documents through the delivery option of choice. The engine provides a flexible range of possibilities for document generation and delivery. Example implementations include:

More overview explaining that you will have at least two data sources - one being the main data set and the other being the delivery XML. The delivery XML is a SQL Query and requires a specific structure described below. *** why in the Invoice test with SQL main data source the Delivery XML is defined as a datasource, but it is not for the other examples?

Enabling a Report for Bursting

Enabling a report for bursting consists of the following steps:

Prerequisite: A report defined in BI Publisher. The report must contain an element by which the report will be split and an element by which the report will be delivered.

Defining the Delivery Data Source

The delivery data set is used as a mapping table. It contains the delivery information for the row. It must be identical for each element grouped by. Therefore the group by (? split by) element is generally the Deliver By Element:

select distinct
      INVOICE_ID KEY,
     'INVOICE' TEMPLATE,
     'RTF' TEMPLATE_FORMAT,
     'en-US' LOCALE,
     'PDF' OUTPUT_FORMAT,
     'FILE' DEL_CHANNEL,
     '/tmp' PARAMETER1,
      INVOICE_ID||'.pdf' PARAMETER2
from   APPS.AP_INVOICES_all

Parameter Mapping

Channel Parameter 1 Parameter 2 Parameter 3 Parameter 4 Parameter 5
Email Email address Subject Body    
Printer Printer Group Printer Number of copies Sides Tray
Fax Fax server Fax Number      
WEBDAV Server Path User Password  
File System   Path User Password  
History     User    

Accessing Reports via a URL

This section describes how to call a BI Publisher report via a URL from another application, for example from a portal or from an Application Express application.

Security Considerations

In the BI Publisher security model, reports are placed in folders and those folders are then secured to a role and a role assigned to a user. For a user to successfully access the report, you must ensure that the user is credentialed within BI Publisher to see it. There are two options for this:

Building the URL

The basic URL for a report is as follows:

http://<server:port>/xmlpserver/<ReportDirectory>/<ReportName>.xdo

where

server:port - is the name of the server and port number where BI Publisher is running

xmlpserver - is a required string (the name of the application)

ReportDirectory - is the folder path to the report

Important: On the BI Publisher server, a report resides in a folder named for the report. For example, assume you have a report called Salary Report. On your BI Publisher desktop it is located in a folder of reports called Executive. Within Executive, it is located in a folder called Private. The path to this report would therefore be

Executive/Private/Salary+Report

Note that you must replace a space in the folder or report name with the + character.

ReportName.xdo - is the name of the report with the .xdo extension.

This will render the complete report inside the BI Publisher page with all the report controls. The default template, output and parameters will be used to render the report. For example:

http://xdopf.us.oracle.com:9999/xmlpserver/Executive/Salary+Report/Salary+Report.xdo 

server:port - xdopf.us.oracle.com:9999

xmlpserver

ReportDirectory - Executive/Salary+Report

ReportName.xdo - Salary+Report.xdo

Specifying Parameters in the URL

If you want to specify parameters for your output report, such as the template, the output format, and any parameters defined for the report, you can add name/value pairs to the URL. The easiest way to generate the URL is to use the Export function from the BI Publisher View Report page. The URL generated will look similar to the basic URL described above, but the name/value pairs will be added.

For example:

http://xdopf.us.oracle.com:9999/xmlpserver/Executive/Employee+Salary+Report/Employee+Salary+Report.xdo?_xpf=&_xpt=1&_xdo=%2FExecutive%2FEmployee+Salary+Report%2FEmployee+Salary+Report.xdo&dept=10&_xt=Standard&_xf=html 

The URL components through the report name are described in the previous section. The URL after the report name consists of:

?_xpf=&_xpt=1&_xdo=%2FExecutive%2FEmployee+Salary+Report%2FEmployee+Salary+Report.xdo&dept=10=*&_xt=Standard&_xf=html 

Note the following standard URL syntax:

? - denotes the first parameter

& - denotes each additional parameter

The BI Publisher parameters are as follows:

_xpf - required string for internal use

_xpt - defines whether to render the report in the full BI Publisher window (as above), or to render just the report document. Valid values are

_xdo - (optional) provides the path to the current report

dept - this is a parameter specific to the report as defined in the report definition. In this case the department for the data. Notice it takes the department ID. The parameter definition is to show the user the department name and then pass the ID to the query. You can have multiple parameters and their values in the URL.

_xt - this controls the template to be used. This is the template name, not the template file name. In this case, the template name is "Standard".

_xf - this controls the format of the output to be generated. Valid values are same as for the report: pdf, html, excel, rtf, or data.