In APEX it is possible to export the data to PDF (Portable Document Format) format. The PDF format is created by Adobe and is widely accepted as a standard. To be able to export to PDF format, you need a report server like BI Publisher, a Java application server like Tomcat or Oracle's Weblogic with Apache FOP or a standard XSL-FO processing engine. We will discuss the interaction with Oracle BI Publisher.
First you need to install Oracle BI Publisher. You can download it from Oracle.com. We downloaded version 10.1.3.4.1 for Windows.
After downloading and unpacking, run setup.exe
and follow the steps in the installer. After installing, try to run BI Publisher. You can find the relevant settings such as the BI Publisher admin screen URL with the username and password and the commands to start and stop BI Publisher in the file BI_Publisher_readme.txt
, which you can find in<drive:>Orahome_1
, where<drive:>
is your local hard drive. By default, the URL is http://localhost:9704/xmlpserver
if you installed BI Publisher on your own computer. If you installed BI Publisher on another computer, localhost must be replaced by the name of the other host. For this recipe, we will use the default hostname localhost and port 9704.
If the installation went OK, you should see something like the following screenshot:
The next step is to configure APEX for BI Publisher. Therefore, you have to log in to the internal workspace as administrator.
apxchpwd.sql
script, which you can find in the APEX directory. You need to execute this script as the SYS user.Now we will make a link below a report region which enables the user to export the report to PDF format.
When using the print link, APEX converts the data to an XML format and sends it to the BI Publisher engine. The convert script then converts it to PDF format and sends it back to APEX.
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