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Oracle® Fusion Middleware Report Designer's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
11g Release 1 (11.1.1)

Part Number E22254-01
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New Features for Report Designers

This preface describes changes to Oracle BI Publisher report designing features for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1).

This preface contains the following topics:

New Features for Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.6)

New features for report designers in Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.6) include:

Improved Create Report Flow

This release streamlines the report creation process introducing a process flow to better guide report designers. For more information, see Section 2.3, "Creating a Report."

Enhancements to Parameter Display Options

Enhancements to parameter display options include:

For more information about these enhancements, see Section 2.7, "Configuring Parameter Settings for the Report."

Support for HTML Formatting in Data

You can now convert stored XHTML to XSL-FO to display the HTML formatting from your data in your generated report. The XHTML data must be extracted wrapped in a CDATA section. Specific syntax must also be used in the RTF template to render it. See Section 4.23, "Rendering HTML Formatted Data in a Report" for more information.

Support for PDF/A and PDF/X Output

PDF/A is a variation of the PDF standard optimized for long term archival of documents. PDF/X is a variation of the PDF standard optimized for professional grade printing. BI Publisher now supports these two types of output. For more information, see Section 2.9, "Generating PDF/A and PDF/X Output."

New Features for Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5)

New features in Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5) include:

Excel Templates

An Excel template is a report layout that you design in Microsoft Excel for retrieving enterprise data in Excel. Excel templates provide a set of special features for controlling the display of data and providing specific formatting instructions. Excel templates support the following features:

For more information, see Chapter 6, "Creating Excel Templates."

Excel Template Builder

BI Publisher provides a downloadable add-in to Excel that enables you to preview the Excel template with sample data. This facilitates design by enabling you to test and edit the template without having to upload it to the BI Publisher catalog first. The Template Builder for Excel is installed automatically when you install the Template Builder for Word. The tools can be downloaded from the Home page of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher or Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition as follows:

Under the Get Started region, click Download BI Publisher Tools.

For more information, see Section 6.1.5, "Desktop Tools for Excel Templates."

Interactive List Component for BI Publisher Layouts

The list component displays all values of a data element in a vertical or horizontal list. When viewed in interactive mode, clicking an item in the list updates the results shown in the linked components of the report. The list enables the report consumer to quickly see results for each item in the list by clicking the list entry. For more information see Section 3.14, "About Lists."

Redesigned Formula Dialog for BI Publisher

The formula dialog in the BI Publisher layout editor has been redesigned for better usability. For more information, see Section 3.15, "Setting Predefined or Custom Formulas."

New Features for Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.3)

New features in Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.3) include:

Major User Interface Improvements

The user interface has undergone major improvements in several areas, including a new Home page and redesigned editors and panes. These improvements are intended to make working with Oracle BI Publisher easier and more consistent. For information about working in the new interface, see Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher.

Shared BI Presentation Catalog

For installations of BI Publisher with the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, BI Publisher now shares the same catalog with Oracle BI Presentation services. For information about the improved catalog, see Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher.

Layout Editor Design Tool

This release introduces a new type of layout template and design tool. The Layout Editor is launched from within BI Publisher and provides an intuitive WYSIWIG drag-and-drop interface for designing report layouts. For a complete description, see Chapter 3, "Creating BI Publisher Layout Templates."

Interactive Viewer

For reports created with the new BI Publisher layout editor, a new interactive output type is available. The interactive viewer enables pop-up chart details, scrollable tables, table filtering, table sorting, and propagated filtering across different components of the report. This interactivity is achieved simply by designing the report in the layout editor, no additional coding is necessary. For more information, see Section 3.1, "Overview of BI Publisher Layouts."

Sub Templates

Previously subtemplates had to be stored outside of the BI Publisher catalog and called at runtime from the external directory. In this release RTF and XSL subtemplates can be saved and managed as objects in the BI Publisher catalog. For more information, see Chapter 12, "Understanding Subtemplates."

Style Templates

A style template is an RTF template that contains style information that can be applied to RTF layouts. The style information in the style template is applied to RTF layouts at runtime to achieve a consistent look and feel across your enterprise reports. Style templates are saved and managed in the BI Publisher catalog. For more information, see Chapter 11, "Creating and Implementing Style Templates."

Zipped PDF Output

This release introduces a feature to split a large PDF output file into smaller, more manageable files, while still maintaining the integrity of the report as one logical unit. When PDF output splitting is enabled for a report, the report is split into multiple files generated in one zip file. The output type is PDFZ. For easy access to the component files, BI Publisher also generates an index file that specifies from and to elements contained in each component PDF file. For more information, see Section A.2, "Generating Zipped PDF Output."