BI Bursting

  • One of the very good features of Oracle BI Publisher is its ability to burst and send the reports to multiple users simultaneously.
  • Using BI Publisher’s bursting feature we can split a single batch report into individual reports to be delivered to multiple destinations. We can apply a different template, output format, delivery method, and locale to each split segment of our report.
  • Example implementations include:
    1. Invoice generation and delivery based on customer-specific layouts and delivery preference
    2. Financial reporting to generate a master report of all cost centers, bursting out individual cost center reports to the appropriate manager
    3. Generation of pay slips to all employees based on one extract and delivered via e-mail

Enabling a Report for Bursting

  • Prerequisite
    • A report defined in BI Publisher. The report data must contain an element by which the report will be split and an element by which the report will be delivered.
  • Enabling a report for bursting consists of the following steps:
    • Open the report in Edit mode.
    • Select Bursting under the report definition.
    • Select the Enable Bursting check box.
    • Select the Split By and Deliver By elements.
  • The Split By element is the data element from the report file that you wish to split the report by. For example, to split a batch of invoices by each invoice, you may use an element called CUSTOMER_NAME.
  • The Deliver By element is the data element from the report file by which to determine the delivery method.
  • In the invoice example, it is likely that each invoice will have delivery criteria determined by customer; therefore the Deliver By element may be CUSTOMER_ID.
    • Select the data source for the delivery XML.
  • The delivery XML can be sourced from the same data source as the main data set, or it can be generated from a different data source.
    • Enter the SQL query to build the delivery XML. See Defining the Delivery Data Set for details.

  • Defining the Delivery Data Set
    • Based on the SQL query that we provide on the Bursting criteria page of the Report Editor, BI Publisher will build the delivery XML data set.
    • The delivery XML data set contains the information to deliver the burst report appropriately to each recipient. The delivery data in this XML document is used as a mapping table for each Deliver By element. The structure of the delivery XML is as follows:

  • Where
    • KEY is the Delivery key and must match the Deliver By element. The bursting engine uses the key to link delivery criteria to a specific section of the burst data. TEMPLATE – is the name of the Layout template to apply. Note that the value is the Layout name (for example, “Invoice”), not the template file name (for example, invoice.rtf).
    • TEMPLATE_FORMAT – is the format of the layout template. Valid values are:
      • RTF
      • PDF
      • ETEXT
      • XLS_FO
    • LOCALE – is the template locale, for example, “en-US”.
    • OUTPUT_FORMAT – is the output format. Valid values are: for example: pdf, html, excel.
      • HTML
      • PDF
      • RTF
      • EXCEL
    • DEL_CHANNEL – is the delivery method. Valid values are:
      • EMAIL
      • FAX
      • FILE
      • FTP
      • PRINT
      • WEBDAV
    • Delivery parameters by channel. The delivery parameters by channel are defined in the following table:
    • Parameter Mapping
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