Oracle BI has fully integrated a common Oracle reporting technology that is almost ubiquitously embedded in Oracle Applications-BI Publisher (BIP). Once known as XML Publisher (XMLP), BI Publisher has been associated with analytics, reporting, and business intelligence under the ranks of Oracle for a long time.
BI Publisher has the ability to connect to many disparate data sources, which makes it a very powerful tool within any organization's enterprise business intelligence toolbox. But the real power comes in two main forms--the ability to manipulate each report at a very granular level by modifying XML and the ability to print crisp, pixel-perfect reports, referred to as highly formatted documents.
Pixel-perfect reporting entails that Oracle BI Publisher has the ability to allow a report template to be developed in one of the BI Publisher's several template development outlets such as Microsoft Word (Template Builder for Word), Microsoft Excel (Analyzer for Excel), Adobe Reader, or a web-based interface, and then print a hard copy of the report to render exactly as it looks when developed on the computer. Several organizations leverage BI Publisher to print shipping labels, checks, invoices, W-2 forms, and utility statements. As an example, in the mail, you may receive a quarterly mutual funds investment statement complete with page headers, footers, page numbers, and charts, and not even know that potentially you are holding a document created dynamically via Oracle BI Publisher.
This chapter covers the main features of BI Publisher in order to get you up to speed in using the tool. We will also mention some of the new features of 12c. Oracle BI Publisher contains a lot of functionality and there are books out there that solely cover this tool. The material in this chapter is aimed at providing a crash course, which should give any reader enough hands-on exercises to get their feet wet and enough of a platform for further research and experimentation.
It is important to know that Oracle BI Publisher 12c is provided in the core Oracle BI 12c installation. During the installation process, you are able to choose to install, or not to install, one or all of the three Oracle BI software suites--Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI Publisher, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions. All suites are selected to be installed by default. Toggling one or more of the options will determine the software that gets installed, but it also determines the default integration between these software items. By keeping Oracle BI and Oracle BI Publisher selected, the security integration with Fusion Middleware Security and other integration configurations are set during the installation. You cannot go back at a later time to modify this installation configuration. Any post-install integration would be a manual effort.
With that said, those previously exposed to BI Publisher will appreciate that BI Publisher 12c can still be installed as a standalone software. That is, it would function correctly and contain all of the features inherent with BI Publisher in the absence of the core OBIEE platform component (presentation services, Oracle BI server, and so on) installation. This configuration could be required in some circumstances, such as an organization only purchasing a license for Oracle BI Publisher. This book focuses on the default installation integration option (that is, both Oracle BI Enterprise Edition and Oracle BI Publisher selected during the components installation configuration) and will continue with that as a prerequisite for all subsequent exercises.
As a quick side note, even when Oracle BI and Oracle BI Publisher are installed on the same server, as per the default installation configuration, BI Publisher continues to leverage its legacy standalone application context root, which can be accessed via the following URL, http://<server_name>:<default_port>/ xmlpublisher.
The default installation configures BI Publisher with the Fusion Middleware Security options. Users can potentially log in to both the /xmlpublisher application path and the /analytics application path. BI Publisher is still ultimately administered via the BI Publisher Administration page interface, although a link exists on the Oracle BI Presentation Services Administration page, which merely navigates to the BI Publisher Administration page.