My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed

After receiving a new, pretty powerful laptop, on Thursday and installing the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition on Friday, this weekend sees my first steps with the BI Publisher (previously known as XML Publisher).  My colleague Marcos is our (AMIS’s) real expert in this area – you may have seen some of this articles on our weblog in the recent past. He writes about Matrix Reports and other more advanced topics, I am just starting out with the tool. I will tell the tale of getting started and creating a first report – one that displays an overview of the most recent blog articles aggregated by the orablogs site.

Here is the report I create in this article, shown as Excel document :

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed
 

The steps are:....

1. install Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.2

2. install Oracle BI Publisher Desktop Edition 10.1.3.2

3. start Oracle BI EE’s OC4J instance and go to homepage

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIpub Home"

4. go to BI Publisher; login as Administrator (or any other account if you have created one)

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIpub EnterBIPub

5. create a new report; call it for example OraBlogsOverview

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIpub createNew
My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub CreateDataSet
My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub OraBlogsReport

6. create a new DataSet: type Url Dataset; enter the OraBlogs’ RSS-feed’s URL:

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub NewDataSet
My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub RSSDataSet

7. Start MS Word, with the Oracle BI Publisher plugin. Create a new document and some boilerplate for the report we are creating.

 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub WordNewDoc

 

8. Connect to the BI Publisher EE server. 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub WordAddinMenu

 

 

 9. Connect as Adminstrator (or the account you used earlier)

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub WordConnect

10. Open the OraBlogsReport – this makes the data set available to BI Publisher Desktop – or at least that is what I expect…

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub OpenReport

11. Replace the text REFRESH_DATA_ORABLOGS with the PubDate field from the Data Set behind the report.

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub InsertDate

12.  Show a preview of the report – to see the date replaced by the date from the live-data feed:

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub PreviewPDF

 

13. Choose PDF, accept saving the document as RTF document and watch the report: 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub InsertedDate
My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub SaveDocAsRTF
My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub PDFPreview1

14. When I now try to insert a Table with the data from the individual blog-articles I run into a problem. Let’s step through the table wizard: 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub InsertTable

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub ReportFormat

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPUb TableWizGrouping

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub TableVelden

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub GroupBy

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub TableSortBy

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub tablePrompts

15. It turns out that the data set we acquire thus is not what we are looking for: instead of the XML document we know the RSS feed returns, we get a much simpler one from the BI Publisher Server:

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub TableInserted

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub Preview1

 

 16. In order to be able to create a proper report, we need to use the correct XML Data Source. So we open the RSS feed in our browser and save the XML content to a local file.

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub SaveRSSSource

 

17. Load the XML Data from the RSS feed in our Word environment. 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPUB loadData

18. Select the correct file and Load.

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub selectXMLFile

19. Start the Table Wizard again. 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub Tbl2GroupMain

 20. Group by Author (that is: the original Blog that has published the article)

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub Tbl2 Group

21. Specify the prompts/labels for the fields in the table in the report: 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub Prompts

22. After closing the Table Wizard, this is how the report is shown:

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub AfterWizardInDoc

24. Running the PDF preview now shows a much nicer report:

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub Preview2

25. Let’s turn the title field into a hyperlink that links to the URL that is in the link element by setting the address to {link} (where {link} refers to the value in the link field. We can then remove the Link column from the table. Let’s also change the font for the Author to a somewhat more impressive one.

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub CreateHyperlink

26. The preview in PDF is now like this:

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub Preview3

 

26. Now it is time to publish the Report Design or Template to the BI Publisher EE Server: 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub PublishToEE

27. Specify the name: 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub UploadTemplate

 

28. And done publishing :

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed BIPub UploadedTemplate

 

29. Back in the BI Publisher EE Server, we can View the Report in various formats, including HTML, RTF, PDF as well as Excel: 

 

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed

After a few hours, when I rerun the report, the PDF preview looks like this (obviously this very article itself has been been included):

My first steps with Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2: create a report based on the OraBlogs rss-feed bipub pdfpreview5feb

You can download the entire PDF report from this time:  bipub_orablogs5feb.pdf

4 Comments

  1. Janet December 12, 2008
  2. Marcos Claver February 12, 2007
  3. Siva Valluru February 6, 2007
  4. Marco Gralike February 6, 2007