Did you ever had to revise custom reports? DId you ever try to move the address a few millimetres to the right because off the introduction of new corporate stationery? Did you ever get headaches because the reporting tool Oracle Reports Developer was crashing once more destroying your recent modifications?

There is a new kid in (reporting) town…

With the introduction of the reporting tool BI Publisher (formerly XML Publisher) these problems are history. Using the tool introduced by Oracle in 2004 as XML Publisher the main disadvantages of the classic reporting environment become outdated:

1. No open standard
2. Not a user-friendly interface
3. No automatic report translations
4. No support for all formats
5. Extraction of data from a non-Oracle DB is problematic
6. Extensive tool training
7. High development costs
8. ‘Eternal’ maintenance
9. High upgrade costs

Since some time now PeopleSoft’s support site Customer Connection has been replaces by Oracle Metalink. The Change Assistant is making use of Customer Connection (when searching for bundles / fixes) and other PeopleSoft servers (like update.peoplesoft.com).

Due to this migration to Customer Connection you might get some issues when using the Change Assistant. This post helps you in getting things working again.

Oracle Application Express (Oracle Apex) is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database. Using only a web browser and limited programming experience, you can develop and deploy professional applications. We wanted to extend the E-Business Suite functionality with Apex features. Apex functions need to be available from the EBS user menu. Users have to be able to move seamlessly from EBS to Apex, without logging in twice. The context of the EBS user needs to specify which data the user is allowed to see in Apex. Our goal was to develop a calendar in Apex which shows a team’s absences for the logged in supervisor. In EBS the “supervisor -> employee” relation has a hierarchical structure, which has to be available in the calendar.

Oracle’s place in the Enterprise Service Bus market has been significantly strengthened through the acquisition of BEA and the incorporation of AquaLogic Service Bus into the Oracle SOA Suite product family alongside the Oracle ESB. But now a days (temporarily) we have a problem which one to choose in new projects.

You don’t need a program like Oracle XML Publisher to present a PeopleSoft user a formatted MS Word file, filled with PeopleSoft data. If you want to export PeopleSoft data to a formatted MS Word file, just follow these few simple steps:

1. create a formatted xml file in MS Word containing placeholders for the PeopleSoft data. Store this xml in the database.
2. Create a page containing an export button, which calls an IScript
3. Create an IScript which retrieves the template from the database, fetches the data to be inserted from the database and substitutes the placeholders for the data.

In detail:

1. Open MS Word and create and format a page normally. Create placeholders that will contain the data from the database or PeopleCode. For example {NAME}. Be sure to save the file as an XML document. We want to store the plain text “source” of the formatted XML document in the database. For this reason open the file in a plain text editor like Notepad. You can check your placeholder(s) here. Copy the contents and save them in the database. This can be in a custom table or perhaps in the message catalog. In this example we’ll use the message catalog 20.000 and item 1.
2. Create a page in Application Designer and insert a button or hyperlink. The destination of the button is a PeopleCode command of a field in a derived record. For example DERIVED_REC.CALL_ISCRIPT. In the FieldChange event of the above mentioned field, call the ViewURL(URL_str) function. The parameter of this function is an IScript which we’ll create in the next step.

Example:

&sUrl = %Request.RequestURI | “?ICType=Script&ICScriptProgramName=DERIVED_REC.CALL_ISCRIPT.FieldFormula.ISCRIPT_XML_RESPONSE”;

ViewURL(&sUrl);

In newer versions you can use functions like GenerateScriptContentURL to compose the IScript URL.

3. Create an IScript with the following content:

A couple of notes:

• Because we are using an IScript we can’t access the component buffer data. So if you want to use content specific variables in your IScript, create some global variables in step 2 which can be addressed in the IScript.
• Don’t forget to add the IScript to the weblibrary of your permission list.
• When creating the xml template, turn off any spelling or grammar checks for this can disturb the xml placeholders.
• When you’ve made an error in a placeholder, completely retype the placeholder. A partial correction can disturb the xml.