Introduction
In this chapter, we will be taking a look at BI Publisher. Previously known as XML Publisher, Oracle BI (Business Intelligence) Publisher is an enterprise reporting solution for authoring, managing, and delivering highly-formatted documents. The flexibility of BI Publisher is a result of the separation of the presentation of the report from its data structure. At runtime, BI Publisher merges returned data into pre-designed template files to create a variety of outputs to meet a wide range of business needs.
In this chapter, we will work through a number of recipes, which will explore the mechanisms for delivering XML-formatted data suitable for use against template files, the creation of template files, and the distribution of populated templates to designated locations and/or recipients.
The following diagram shows the basic processing when generating a report:
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