Mariano Greis
Member
Hi.
For the past few years we've been using a customized layout-generating solution that allows us to remap the fields on the PDF generated by JDE to wherever we want, add custom literals, images, etc by use of a simple select-and-drag GUI. It can take us less than ten minutes to make a minor positioning change to a report, even if that report hasn't ever had a custom layout associated to it, since all of the fields in the original PDF are preserved, and it takes us about one to three hours to produce a fully customized template to our report, similar (but not quite as pretty, if I may say so) to the ones used as examples by Oracle to promote BIP.
We've been contemplating the possibility of using BI Publisher, mainly due to a couple of features our custom solution doesn't provide (i.e., graphics generation), however, we cannot find a way to make a small change to a particular report without having to map ALL of its fields in a layout first. On top of it all, on the contrary to the easily-understood XML fields you can have by way of custom queries using the standalone BIP client, the embedded solution relies on the extremely cryptic XML data generated by JDE.
Is there something we are missing? Is there a way to:
1) make a small, custom change to a report without having to manually map all the fields?
2) somehow modify the XML output generated by JDE to make it more human-friendly?
Thanks in advance!
For the past few years we've been using a customized layout-generating solution that allows us to remap the fields on the PDF generated by JDE to wherever we want, add custom literals, images, etc by use of a simple select-and-drag GUI. It can take us less than ten minutes to make a minor positioning change to a report, even if that report hasn't ever had a custom layout associated to it, since all of the fields in the original PDF are preserved, and it takes us about one to three hours to produce a fully customized template to our report, similar (but not quite as pretty, if I may say so) to the ones used as examples by Oracle to promote BIP.
We've been contemplating the possibility of using BI Publisher, mainly due to a couple of features our custom solution doesn't provide (i.e., graphics generation), however, we cannot find a way to make a small change to a particular report without having to map ALL of its fields in a layout first. On top of it all, on the contrary to the easily-understood XML fields you can have by way of custom queries using the standalone BIP client, the embedded solution relies on the extremely cryptic XML data generated by JDE.
Is there something we are missing? Is there a way to:
1) make a small, custom change to a report without having to manually map all the fields?
2) somehow modify the XML output generated by JDE to make it more human-friendly?
Thanks in advance!