Goodbye Reports, Hello BI Publisher and Logica’s BIP booklet!

“want to do something on the first page of a repeating group”

Only way i’ve found to fix this is:

I haven’t mastered the templating properly yet so i’ve have to duplicate everything from then on.

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Surprisingly, I am never able to find anyone complaining about the disadvantages of BI Publisher. As someone who’s primary job responsibility is creating reports, I can tell yo that BI/XML Publisher has some big problems. And it seems that being able to make templates in MS Word blinds everyone to these major problems.

I do indeed use XML Publisher, and I find it very useful in some cases. The one case in which I find it useful is where there is a data set, and different people want to view different sub-sets of the data, or view it summed or grouped in different ways. In this case, if the users want simple output, then XML Publisher works great.

Where one starts to run into problems is when you want to make professional looking documents. Specifically ones that appear as though they were printed on pre-printed stationary. There are indeed examples of how to do this, but this is ONLY if your details line height will never change, and not only that, but it is quite complicated.

The next case where you run into problems, is when you want to do something on the first page of a repeating group. Now, I know about the beginning and end sections of the entire report, and I am not referring to this. What I am referring to is when you have a for-each, and one iteration will span multiple pages, and you want one thing to print on the first page of that iteration, and something else on the rest of the pages of that group iteration. I have not found a solution to this yet, but if there is a solution, it is not as simple as adding a single setting or tag.

Both of the examples I gave are mind blowingly simple in Oracle Reports. And these are not the only cases where something extremely simple in Oracle Reports is either impossible or extremely difficult in XML Publisher.

I disagree with some of the disadvantages listed for, what I assume is, Oracle Reports:

2. Not a user-friendly interface

I find Oracle Reports to be quite user friendly. The XML Publisher interface in MS Word, in my opinion, is friendly if you only use the wizard, and don’t want to do anything complex. If you do, you have to use obscure tags, many of which are not well explained in the developer’s manual, or are not there at all.

6. Extensive tool training

I agree with this point, but again, only if someone is using the wizard in MS Word. If you are going to do something very, very simple, such as displaying tabular data, you can do all of this with the wizard, and training is almost nil. But, if you want to do much work in the medium to advanced level, this is where Oracle Reports really excels. One can be trained to work at this level very easy in Oracle Reports, but training someone to make XML Publisher reports at this level would be quite difficult.

7. High development costs

See above.

Certainly I don’t want to say that BI/XML Publisher is worthless. It absolutely has cases where it is great, but a complete replacement for Oracle Reports it is not. As I said before, so many simple features of Oracle Reports are either missing or difficult. Someday, as they continue to develop the tool, it may be able to replace Oracle Reports, but that day is not today, and I don’t see that happening for quite some time to come.

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How do I down load a soft copy

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Administrator Reply:
July 31st, 2009 at 6:58 pm

I’m afread we have only hardcopies (in Dutch only) available…

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Hi Klasien,

Is it also possible to download a digital version of this book?

Thanks for the great post and book.

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