BI Publisher : Formatting Issues

By: Guest Author

While creating BI Publisher reports the formatting issues are quite common.Here I am
discussing some common issues related to BIP report development.

1) First issue is related to column formatting.When you want to display some data
which has leading zeros or trailing zeros after '.' in EXCEL output you will not get the
desired output.But in PDF it will come as what you are expecting.This is not with the
issue of your data. This is due to the unique nature of EXCEL cell format.When you are
trying to put a text data in a cell with out making any change to cell format it will treat as
number and it will truncate all leading zeros and all trailing zeros after '.' . So what you
have to do is to convert that data into a format which EXCEL can treat as text.
Eg: If you want to display 0020100 convert this data into ="0020100". Same way
for 23789.02300 to ="23789.02300".

Note: This is applicable to EXCEL output only.If you have multiple output type
apply it only for EXCEL.
2) Second is related to report size issue in PDF output type.If the number of columns
are more and if you want to show most of the columns in one row and
if it is a PDF output you can choose the paper size as Legal (8.5 x 14''). You will get
more spaces in the template to accommodate more columns.
3) If your XML data contains special characters like &,<,> etc .. pass the data
to DBMS_XMLGEN.CONVERT function.It will replace special characters with
corresponding XML notations.
Eg: (a>b) & (c!=d) to (a&gt;b) &amp; (c!=d)