Oracle BI Publisher

RTF Template Development Tutorial

Author: Tim Dexter/Kanichiro Nishida

Last Updated: July 14, 2009
 Page 2 of 20

Contents
Oracle BI Publisher ..............................................................................................................................................1
RTF Template Development Tutorial................................................................................................................1
Contents........................................................................................................................................................2
Customer Balance Report Tutorial.......................................................................................................................3
Step 1: Load Sample XML Data........................................................................................................................3
Step 2: Insert address block and report level dates and totals..........................................................................3
Step 3: Preview Template.................................................................................................................................3
Step 4: Insert a table of Invoices.......................................................................................................................4
Step 5: Number & Date Formatting ..................................................................................................................6
Number formatting.........................................................................................................................................6
Date formatting..............................................................................................................................................7
Step 6: Dressing Up..........................................................................................................................................7
Headers and Footers.....................................................................................................................................7
Images..........................................................................................................................................................8
Page Numbering...........................................................................................................................................8
Step 7: Adding Total ........................................................................................................................................9
Adding Total..................................................................................................................................................9
Step 8: Adding Page/Brought Forward/Carried Forward Total .........................................................................9
Step 9: Adding Running Total ........................................................................................................................11
Step 10: For loop............................................................................................................................................12
Step 11: Page/Section Break..........................................................................................................................12
Step 12: Conditional formatting ......................................................................................................................13
Step 13: Adding a barcode..............................................................................................................................13
Step 14: Sorting..............................................................................................................................................14
Step 15: Different Last Page...........................................................................................................................15
Step 16: Chart.................................................................................................................................................15
Step 17: Add Table of Contents or Bookmark!................................................................................................17
Table of Contents........................................................................................................................................17
Step 17: Add Table of Contents or Bookmark!................................................................................................18
Bookmark....................................................................................................................................................18
Step 17: Crosstab...........................................................................................................................................19
........................................................................................................................................................................20
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................................20
 Page 3 of 20

Customer Balance Report Tutorial

This tutorial describes how you would typically create a layout template for the Receivables Customer Balance
Report. It will use the following two sample data XML files

- AR_SAMPLE_DATA.xml
- Crosstab_Sample_Data.xml

AR_Sample_Data.xml is required for most of the training steps in this tutorial. Crosstab_Sample_Data.xml is
required only for Crosstab training.

Before you start the following set of training steps, make sure that you have installed BI Publisher Desktop
Add-in.

Step 1: Load Sample XML Data

From the Data menu select Load XML Data to load a sample XML document that contains the data fields you
may want to insert into your RTF layout template. Select the XML data file called AR_SAMPLE_DATA.xml.

Step 2: Insert address block and report level dates and totals
You may want to select single data fields, such as the customer name and address at the header of the letter.
Position the cursor in the Word document where you want to insert the Address. From the Insert menu select
Field… to open the dialog window shown below.

Select the field Customer Name and click Insert to insert a form field for the customer name into the
document. You may also insert the remaining address fields (such as Address Line1, City, State and Zip).
You can also just drag the Customer Name field from the dialog and drop it into the Word document.

Note: As a beginner, you should use Insert Fields only for data fields that are unique (not repeating) in your
document. Refer to the “Insert Table” section for additional information on how to insert repetitive fields

Step 3: Preview Template

After adding fields to the document, you may want to test your template. Oracle BI Publisher Template Builder
allows you to preview your template with your sample XML data. You can preview the output in Adobe Acrobat
Reader (PDF), Microsoft Word file (RTF), Microsoft EXCEL (EXCEL) or a browser (HTML).
 Page 4 of 20
From the Preview menu select HTML to preview your template in a browser. From the Preview menu select
PDF to preview your document in Acrobat Reader. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader version 5.0 or higher
installed to preview documents in PDF format. You can download Acrobat Reader for free at
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

The preview should show Vision Corporation instead of the field Customer Name.

Step 4: Insert a table of Invoices

You can build a table or a repeating section by inserting the elements and then adding additional form fields
with processing instructions (for-each). Instead, the Template Builder offers an additional function that
generates a table for you.

The document should include a table of all invoices that are not or only partially paid. On the Insert menu
select Table/Form > Advanced to open the Table/Form Dialog The following dialog will be displayed:

Scroll in the left Data Source view pane until you see the G Invoices element. Push the left mouse button and
drag the G Invoices element over to the center Template tree view. When you drop an element with children
(other elements below the element), the following pop-up dialog appears:　

Note: A Node is a term used in tree views for an element in the tree view. For example, Customer
Name, G Currency and G Invoices are all nodes. Transaction Date is also called a child node of G
Invoices, and G Invoices is referred to as a parent node of Transaction Date.

To add multiple nodes, click Drop All Nodes with the left mouse button. When you select the "G Invoices"
node, the dialog box should now look like this:
 Page 5 of 20

　
We only want to show the fields Trx Number, Trans Type, Transaction Date, Trans Amount, and Trans
Amount Remaining. Select the field Receipt Amount in the center view and press the Delete button on your
keyboard. Repeat the procedure for the other fields that you do not want to be included in the table (as shown
in the screenshot below).

You should now click again on the G Invoices element in the center view. The Properties region on the right
shows how the data fields will be formatted. You should see the following information:

For each group you can set the following properties that describe how a group (such as G Invoices) should be
rendered by the template builder:

Style: Select Table to create a table around the data fields.

Grouping: Grouping is an advanced operation that allows you to re-group the data – for example by
transaction date instead of currency. You can select the element that the data should be grouped by for
this property. Please refer to the Oracle BI Publisher User’s Guide for additional information on
grouping.
 Page 6 of 20
Show Grouping Value: This property will only be shown if you have selected a node created by the
Grouping functionality. You can choose for a group if the Data Field node used as a grouping criterion
is shown in the table or form.

Sort By: You can select an element by which the data groups are sorted.

Sort Order: If you have selected an element for Sort By you can select, if the data should be sorted
either ascending or descending.

Sort Data Type: If you have selected an element for Sort By the data is by default sorted as Text.
That means that 12 will be shown after 111. If you need to sort numbers you should select Number as
the sort data type

Break: This property allows you to insert a page break or a section break between every data group. If
nothing is select, then the data groups will be shown continuously with no break. If you select New
Page per Element, then a page break will be inserted between each element. If you select New
Section per Element, a section break will be created for each data group. A section break allows
changing the header/footer and resets the page number. You will typically use this option, if you want
to print multiple documents (for example invoices or purchase orders) to a single PDF file.

The order in which the data elements are shown reflects the order of the columns in the table. If you want to
reorder the columns you need to change the Insert Position box from Child to Same Level. Then drag the
elements into the correct order.

Click the OK button to create the table. The inserted table should look like this:

Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount Remaining
for-each TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTION_DATE TRANS_AMOUNT TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAININ
G_INVOICES G end G_INVOICES
TRX_NUMBER

The Template Builder creates two kinds of form fields:

 Form fields representing data elements

 Form fields with processing instructions for repeating table rows or document section

Form fields representing data elements are replaced with the data when the template is processed. The for-
each G_INVOICES and end G_INVOICES form fields indicate a repeating section. The section of the
document encapsulated by these two form fields is repeated, if the associated data element G_INVOICE is
found repetitively in the data. Please refer to the Oracle BI Publisher User’s Guide for additional information on
form fields.

You can now format these elements in Microsoft Word and add additional text. You can also move fields
around as long as you keep them in the surrounding for-each G_INVOICES and end G_INVOICES processing
instruction. If you remove one of these processing instructions your template may not work anymore with BI
Publisher. You now can preview the template again to review your current template, this time try PDF as an
output.

Step 5: Number & Date Formatting

You probably would like to change the alignment of the table columns or change the data type and format for
the amounts and dates.

Number formatting
Select the TRANS_AMOUNT field, right-click and select Properties to see the Text Form Field Options
dialog.
 Page 7 of 20

You may select the Number in the Type field, #,##0.00 for Number format and enter 1000 as the Default
Number to achieve a more desirable format for currencies in US Dollar.

Date formatting
To format the date, open the form field dialog for the TRANSACTION_DATE and specify that it is a Date field.
Then select the date format you want to use. It should be noted here that BI Publisher is expecting the date
data as an XSD format date (Canonical Date Format) e.g. 2006-09-01 00:00:00.0. If the date is not in this
format then BI Publisher will be unable to format it further.

Formatting options defined in this dialog box are understood by Oracle BI Publisher and used to format your
fields. Now preview your template again to see the date and number formatting in action.

Step 6: Dressing Up

Headers and Footers

You will have noticed by now that you can use the MSWord header and footer functionalities. You can place a
company logo, report title, and page numbering, etc, in the header and in the footer, and also you can place a
BI Publisher’s boilerplates to display data in the header and footer in the generated reports. Only one problem
is that MS Word doesn’t let you place text form fields nor auto shapes in the area, so if you have such
requirements that you need to, for example, display auto shapes or have conditions that you want to write by
using the text form, then you can use BI Publisher’s tag, <?start:body?> and <?end body?>.

Anything before <?start:body?> tag would be considered as header area and after <?end body?> would be as
footer area, and the between the two tags would be body content area. We will use the BI Publisher’s
header/footer tags for this exercise.

Also it’s a best practice to use a table component to control the layout, so we’ll use a table in the header
section and another table in the footer section.

1. Type <?start:body?> before CUSTOMER_NAME text form. and type <?end body?> after the table.
(You can use a text form to have this tag as well.)
2. Insert a table in the header before the <?start:body?> tag and another table after the <?end body?>
tag. Choose 3 columns and 1 row for the each table.
3. From the right click menu choose ‘Borders and Shading’ and make all the grid and table frame lines not
to be displayed.
4. Type ‘Customer Balance Report’ in the central column of the header table. Make that to be bold and
center alignment.
 Page 8 of 20
5. Type ‘Draft’ in the central column of the footer table. Make that to be bold and center alignment.

Now your template should look like this.

Customer Balance Report

<?start:body?>

CUSTOMER_NAME
ADDRESS_LINE1
CITY, STATE, ZIP

Trx Number TranADDRES Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount

S_LINE1s Remaining
Type
F TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTION_DATE TRANS_AMOUNT TRANS_AMOUNT_RE
TRX_NUMBER MAININGF

<?end body?>
Draft

Images
It’s a simple case of using the Insert>Picture> From File to insert an image into the header/footer or main
region of the report. Let’s insert Oracle company logo in the header region. You should have downloaded the
file called company_logo.png onto your local machine by now, otherwise download it from the files online
folder.

Page Numbering
You can use the MSWord autotext ‘Page X of Y’ and other auto text objects if you use MSWord’s native header
and footer functionalities. But this time we’re not using that, instead we’re using BI Publisher’s tags to support
the header and footer. But we still can display such page number.

1. Place a cursor into the most right cell and choose ‘Field’ from ‘Insert’ tool bar menu and select ‘Page’.
2. Type ‘of’ after the ‘Page’ field.
3. Choose ‘Field’ from ‘Insert’ tool bar menu and select ‘NumPages’ and place it right after the ‘of’.
4. Make the cell to be right alignment

Now your template should look like this.

Customer Balance Report 8 of 20

<?start:body?>

CUSTOMER_NAME
ADDRESS_LINE1
CITY, STATE, ZIP

Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount
Remaining
F TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTION_DATE TRANS_AMOUNT TRANS_AMOUNT_RE
TRX_NUMBER MAININGF

<?end body?>
Draft

BI Publisher supports many of the MSWord native functions so spend some time changing the look and feel of
your report using the MSWord dialogs. For example, font size, font color, table color, table lines, etc, etc…
 Page 9 of 20
Step 7: Adding Total

Adding Total
Now you want to see the total amount of the whole transactions amount. This would be very simple.
1. Click Insert from Template Builder tool bar menu and choose Field
2. Select TRANS_AMOUNT element and choose ‘SUM’ as a calculation
3. Click Insert button

You can add another SUM Total for TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING, too. In this tutorial, you’ll add another
row at the last row of the table so that you can display total amount of the whole transaction at the last row of
the table. So it would look like this.

Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount Remaining
F TRX_NUMBER TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTION_DATE TRANS_AMOUNT TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING
E
Total: sum sum
TRANS_AMOUNT TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING

Step 8: Adding Page/Brought Forward/Carried Forward Total

In this exercise we also want to display page total, brought forward total and carried forward total of the
transaction amount in each page. The brought forward total is a total amount of the previous page that is
forwarded to the current page while the carried forward total is a total amount of the current page that is carried
to the next page. Since we want to display these total values in every page, we will put the brought forward
total in header area and the carried forward total in footer area.

Set Page Total

1. Insert another text form into TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING column’s cell of the main table, place it
right before the TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING text form.
2. Double click on the text form and type ‘PT’ as a default value.
3. click ‘Add Help Text’ and type the following in the box.
<?add-page-total:pt;'TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING'?>
4. Click OK.
 Page 10 of 20

Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount Remaining
F TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTION_DATE TRANS_AMOUNT PTTRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINI
TRX_NUMBER NG E
Total: sum sum
TRANS_AMOUNT TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING

Display Page Total in Footer

1. Insert a row above the existing row in the Footer.

2. Type ‘Page Total:’ and select right alignment in the central cell of the footer table.
3. Place mouse cursor at the right cell of the table and click ‘Text Form Field’ icon from the tool bar to
insert a Text Form.
4. Double click on the text form and click ‘Add Help Text’ and type the following in the box.
<xdofo:show-page-total name="pt" format="99G999G999D00"/>
5. Type ‘Page Total’ in Default Text field and click OK.

Note that you need to specify a number format in the xdofo tag and MS Word number formatting functionality
can not be used.

Page Total: Page Total

Draft

Display Brought Forward Total in Header

1. Insert a row below the existing one in a header table

2. Select the entire row and select ‘Boarders and Shading’ from right click menu
3. Under Boarder tag, set a boarder line for the bottom and click OK.
4. Type ‘Brought Forward Total:’ and select right alignment in the central cell of the header bottom line.
5. Place mouse cursor at the right cell of the table and click ‘Text Form Field’ icon from the tool bar to
insert a Text Form.
6. Double click on the text form and click ‘Add Help Text’ and type the following in the box.
<xdofo:show-brought-forward name="pt" format="99G999G999D00"/>
7. Type ‘Forward Total’ in Default Text field and click OK.

Customer Balance Report 10 of 20

Brought Forward Total: Forward Total

Display Carried Forward Total in Footer

1. Insert an additional row under Page Total row in the Footer table
2. Type ‘Carried Forward Total:’ and select right alignment in the central cell of the footer table.
3. Place mouse cursor at the right cell of the table and click ‘Text Form Field’ icon from the tool bar to
insert a Text Form.
4. Double click on the text form and click ‘Add Help Text’ and type the following in the box.
<xdofo:show-carry-forward name="pt" format="99G999G999D00"/>
5. Type ‘Carried Total’ in Default Text field and click OK.

Page Total: Page Total

Carried Forward Total: Carried Total
Draft

And now you should have something like this.

Customer Balance Report 10 of 20

Brought Forward Total: Forward Total

 Page 11 of 20
<?start:body?>

Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount Remaining
F TRX_NUMBER TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTION_DATE TRANS_AMOUNT PT;
TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING E

sum TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING

<?end body?>
Page Total: Page Total
Carried Forward Total: Carried Total
Draft

Step 9: Adding Running Total

Ok, we’re almost done for this total stuff! Just one more, it’s very exciting one! It’s a running total that will keep
adding the previous value to the current value when it goes down the cells so the very last value should be the
same as a total value. This requires a little trick, so it might sound a bit complicated, but once you understand
it, it’s pretty straight forward! Basically what you need to do is to define a variable, and add the current value to
whatever the value has been added at the previous cell.

1. Insert a Text Form at the beginning of the body space.

2. Double click on the text form and type ‘RT’ as the default text.
3. Click ‘Add Help Text’ and type the following.
<?xdoxslt:set_variable($_XDOCTX,'RT', 0)?>
4. Click OK.
5. Add a column to the right of Trans Amount Remaining and name the column header as Running Total.
6. Cut and past <?end for-each?> tag from the Trans Amount Remaining cell to the added cell so that it
will be the last tag in the row of the table.
7. Insert a Text Form in the Running Total’s cell.
8. Double click the text form and type ‘Set’ as the default text.
9. Click ‘Add Help Text’ and type the following. (this part gets the last value and add the current value to
it, and set the accumulated value to the RT variable.)
<?xdoxslt:set_variable($_XDOCTX,'RT', xdoxslt:get_variable($_XDOCTX,'RT')
+TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING)?>
10. Click OK.
11. Insert a Text Form right after the ‘Set’ text form.
12. Double click the text form and change Type to ‘Number’ and type ’999.00’ as the default text, and
select ‘#,##0.00’ as the number format.
13. Click ‘Add Help Text’ and type the following. (this part just displays the current accumulated value,
which has been set by the functions that are set in ‘Set’ text form.)
<?xdoxslt:get_variable($_XDOCTX,'RT')?>
14. Click OK.

Ok, so hope you can make all the above steps set right, so by this point your report should look like this.

Customer Balance Report 11 of 20

Brought Forward Total: Forward Total

<?start:body?>
     
Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount Running Total
Remaining
F TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTI TRANS_AMOUN PT; Set999.00E
TRX_NUMBER ON_DATE T TRANS_AMOUNT_
REMAINING

sum TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING

<?end body?>
 Page 12 of 20
Page Total: Page Total
Carried Forward Total: Carried Total
Draft

Step 10: For loop

Now you might have already noticed that your report displays invoice information only for one customer but
when you look into the XML data file there is much more customers information! This is because now you have
only one ‘for loop’ that is used for G_INVOICE node. In order to display multiple customer information you need
to have another for-loop at G_CUSTOMER level.

You can simply insert a text form field by clicking text form field button into right before CUSTOMER_NAME
filed, and double click the filed to open a dialog and click on ‘Add Help Text…’ button. And you can input the
following.

<?for-each:G_CUSTOMER?>

As any other programming would do the same, you need to close the for-loop, so you need to insert another
text form field to input the following.

<?end for-each?>

And at this point, having the brought forward and carried forward doesn’t really make sense anymore, so let’s
remove them just to make it simple. So now it should look like the below.

Customer Balance Report 12 of 20

<?start:body?>

FCUSTOMER_NAME
ADDRESS_LINE1
CITY, STATE, ZIP
     
Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount Running Total
Remaining
F TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTION_DATE TRANS_AMOUNT PT; Set999.00E
TRX_NUMBER TRANS_AMOUNT_RE
MAINING

sum TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING
EF
<?end body?>
Draft

Step 11: Page/Section Break

Now your report displays all the customer’s transaction data as one document, some of the customers
information is displayed across the pages and starts at the middle of the page. But you might want to create it
as multiple documents in one report book, which means that you want to have each customer data started at
the top of the page so that you can separate each customer’s data into different documents and send them to
each customer, for example.

The easiest way to achieve this is to insert a page break.

1. Place your mouse cursor between sum TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING and EF
2. Select Insert from Word tool bar and select ‘Break…’ menu, choose ‘Page Break’ and click OK.

However, as you might notice it the page number is still continuous across pages so when you separate each
customer’s document the page number wouldn’t make sense. In order to have different set of page number for
each customer’s document you can use a section break.

1. Double click on the first ‘for-each’ for Customer Name text form.
 Page 13 of 20
2. Change the ‘for-each’ loop to ‘for-each@section’

Example:

Before
<?for-each:G_CUSTOMER?>

After
<?for-each@section:G_CUSTOMER?>

3. Click OK.

Try Preview and make sure that your report displays customer data per customer and each customer section
always starts from the top page. Also the page number starts with each customer and the total number of the
pages are the number of pages for each customer’s.

Step 12: Conditional formatting

You can highlight certain values in your invoice table. Let’s assume we want to use a red background on any
amount remaining that is greater than $10000. To achieve this we need to add some XSL code to check the
value and set the background color to be red if the value is greater than 10000.

The XSL code you need is:

<?if:TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING >10000?>
<xsl:attribute xdofo:ctx="block" name="background-color">red</xsl:attribute>
<?end if?>

Step:
1. Insert a text form right before TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING
2. Double click on the text form
3. Type ‘Red’ as a default text
4. Click ‘Add Help Text..’
5. Insert the following tags.

<?if:TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING >100000?>
<xsl:attribute xdofo:ctx="block" name="background-color">red</xsl:attribute>
<?end if?>

This tests the amount remaining value. If it’s over 1,000,000 then the background color attribute is set to red.
This will override any other background color that may have been set.

Step 13: Adding a barcode

To add a barcode you’ll first need one. Install the Customer Balance Template/FREE3OF9.ttf font into your
WINDOWS_HOME/fonts directory. Now restart MSWord, the font will now be available from the font drop down
list.
Highlight the fields or text you want and select the barcode font. Now you need to define a mapping by creating
a custom document property.
1. Select File  Properties  Custom Tab
2. In the Name field enter: xdo-font.Free 3 of 9.normal.normal – notice the name of the font
must match the name of the font in the MSWord font drop down
3. In the Value field enter: truetype.c:\windows\fonts\FREE3OF9.ttf
 Page 14 of 20

4. Now test your template using the Preview function and you should see the barcode rendered based on
the data.

This works fine as long as you generate the report on your local machine, but note that it means it wouldn’t
work when you try to generate the report at a different machine unless the barcode font has been installed and
the appropriate font mapping has already been defined. If you need to run the report at a different machine, for
example at a server, which probably would be most of the cases, then you need to set such font configuration
information. We don’t go through that for this training but you can find the detail information how to set the font
information in User’s guide.

Step 14: Sorting

Now you want to display the transaction data from the lowest to the highest based on the transaction amount.
BI Publisher supports a sorting function in the both ways, ascending and descending.

1. Double Click on the text form for ‘G_INVOICES’ for-each loop, which is right before TRX_NUMBER
2. Add the following

<?sort:TRANS_AMOUNT;'ascending';data-type='text'?>

Trx Number Trans Type Transaction Date Trans Amount Trans Amount Running Total
Remaining
F TRANS_TYPE TRANSACTI TRANS_AMOUN PT; Set999.00E
TRX_NUMBER ON_DATE T REDTRANS_AMOU
NT_REMAINING

(Double click on ‘F’ text form right before the TRX_NUMBER, you can find the sorting tag.

First, you need to specify on which data you want to sort and select whether ascending or descending. When
you preview at this point you’ll notice that the data is sorted based on the TRANS_AMOUNT value but it’s not
quite right. For example, 120,653.20 is displayed before 12,375.00 although the sorting order should be
ascending, which means from the lowest to the highest. This is because now the sorting is done based on the
text value base sorting, not the number value base. You can change the ‘data-type=’text’ to ‘data-
type=’number’, then you’ll see the data is now sorted by TRANS_AMOUNT number value.
 Page 15 of 20
Step 15: Different Last Page
BI Publisher supports different last page header/footer or content. This is useful for documents
such as checks, invoices, or purchase orders on which you may want certain content, such as
check or summary, only in the last page. BI Publisher provides this ability. To utilize this feature,
you must create a section break in your template to ensure the content of the final page is
separated from the rest of the report and Insert the following syntax on the final page:
<?start@last-page:body?>
<?end body?>

Any content above or below these two tags will appear only on the last page of the report. Also,
note that because this command explicitly specifies the content of the final page, any desired
headers or footers previously defined for the report must be reinserted on the last page.

1. Add another row in a table in the footer.

2. Type ‘Trans Amount Remaining Total’ in the right cell.
3. Set the mouse cursor at the end of the first page.
4. Click Insert from tool bar and choose Break, and select ‘Next Page’ under ‘Section Break Type’
5. Now you see another one page has been added. Move to the page.
6. Insert the following tags.

<?start@last-page:body?>
<?end body?>

7. Copy the header and footer content from the first page and paste them to each of the header and
footer area in the second page.
8. Click ‘Insert’ from Template Builder menu and select ‘Field’.
9. Select ‘Trans Amount Remaining’ from the tree and choose ‘SUM’ from the calculation LOV, and click
‘Insert’ button, so that you have the sum of Trans Amount Remaining in the right cell right after
‘Remaining Transaction Amount Total:’
10. Try Preview to see the result

You will notice that all the pages show total amount of Trans Amount Remaining in the footer area except for
the first page for the customer that goes across more than one page. For example, look at a customer,
Computer Service and Rentals, which has 2 pages of the report. You’ll see that there is no Trans Amount
Remaining total displayed in the footer area in the first page and only the second page has the Trans Amount
Remaining total displayed in the footer. That’s what we are talking about! ;-)

The second page should look similar to this.

Customer Balance Report 15 of 20

Brought Forward Total: Forward Total

<?start@last-page:body?>
<?end body?>
Trans Amount Remaining: TRANS_AMOUNT_REMAINING
Page Total: Page Total
Carried Forward Total: Carried Total
Draft

Step 16: Chart

To add a chart basically you need to do these 2 steps, the first is to insert a dummy image and the second is to
define BI Beans Graph XML in Alternative Text area under Web tab of Format Picture dialog. But it’s not easy
to understand this BI Beans Graph XML. Especially if you’re just starting, (well, even you’re experienced but
still!) you might get overwhelmed by this. But don’t worry! there is a Chart creation tool that can be accessed by
the template builder tool menu. The following is the steps to insert a chart that shows customer’s transaction
amount per customer in vertical bar graph.

Before you start the following steps, you need to take the section break out from the ‘for-each@section’, which
you have done it at Step 11.

1. Click Chart under Insert menu of Template Builder

2. Drag and Drop ‘CUSTOMER_NAME’ element from the left tree pane to Labels.
 Page 16 of 20
3. And check Grouping
4. Drag and Drop ‘TRANS_AMOUNT from the left pane to main area or Value.
5. Select ‘Bar Graph – Vertical’ as Type
6. Select ‘Comet’ as Style
7. Select ‘SUM’ as Measure and choose
8. Click OK.

After you click ‘OK’ you’ll see a dummy image inserted in your report. At this point, the image doesn’t show the
data in the Graph plot area though Customer names are displayed correctly. This is because inside the chart
XSL definition the XPATH for TRANS_AMOUNT element is not set appropriately. Follow the following steps to
modify the XSL definition.

1. Double click on the Chart image

2. Click Web tab
3. Find the following tags

<Cell>
<xsl:value-of select="sum(current-group()/TRANS_AMOUNT)"/>
</Cell>

4. Change it to

<Cell>
<xsl:value-of select="sum(current-group()//TRANS_AMOUNT)"/>
</Cell>

Notice the extra ‘/’ between ‘current-group() and ‘TRANS_AMOUNT’.

Try preview you’ll see the bar graph will be displayed with actual values.

Example:
 Page 17 of 20

You can also try different type of charts by using the Chart Creation Tool of the template builder.

There are whole a lot of different types of graphs are supported as long as BI Beans supports, but you need to
understand the Graph XML and Data XML definition, you can find more information on BI Beans web site.

Ok, we’re almost done, all the contents are presented. But at the last thing, let’s master this very cool technique
that would attracts a lot of people! It’s Table of Contents and Bookmark!

Step 17: Add Table of Contents or Bookmark!

Table of Contents
This is pretty easy and very straightforward. What you need to do is just to use MS Word native function.

1. Type <?CUSTOMER_NAME?> and remove CUSTOMER_NAME text form, this is because the Table of
Content function can not handle the text form.
2. Change the font setting for the <?CUSTOMER_NAME?> to be ‘Heading 1’.
3. Insert a section break before the first page header so that you will have a blank page as the first page.
You can use MS Word’s section break for this. (Insert->Break->Section Break->Next Page)
4. Move to the inserted first page and place your mouse cursor into the first page.
5. Click Insert from the tool menu and select Reference-> Index and Tables
6. Click Table of Content tab and choose how you want to display your Table of Contents
7. Click OK.
8. Make sure that the table of contents has <?CUSTOMER_NAME?> tag inserted.

So, you should see something like the following in the first page.
 Page 18 of 20

Step 17: Add Table of Contents or Bookmark!

As one of new features that have been introduced with 10.1.3.2 is a Crosstab support through Template
Builder. Before, you still could create a crosstab, but you need to develop some logic to support dynamically
generating columns and cells. Yes, if you have been there you know what I’m talking about… It was a lot of
pain! But now, you can just insert the crosstab from the Template Builder tool bar and map required element in
the UI, and you have the crosstab in your template! It’s nothing!

In order to play with the crosstab, let’s start with a new data and new template.

1. Create a new RTF template

2. Import

Bookmark
So the one last step! Now you have a table of contents displayed in the first page and sometimes that is what
users want. But if you’re familiar with PDF document you might want to make it as a bookmark that is displayed
at left pane and makes so easy to move around the document you generate. Only you need to do is to add BI
Publisher’s tag before and after the table of contents that has been added at the previous step.

1. Remove the section break that has been used to create the first page for the table of contents because
the table of contents is not going to be displayed, it will be converted to a bookmark, so you don’t want
to have one blank page at the first page.
2. Add the following tag before the table of contents.
<?convert-to-bookmark:?>
 Page 19 of 20
3. Add the following tag after the table of contents.
<?end convert-to-bookmark:?>

Now, try preview the document, you will see a bookmark that has links to each customer’s report. Pretty cool,
huh?!

<The following section is added with the release of 10.1.3.2.>

Step 17: Crosstab

One of the new features that have been introduced since R10.1.3.2 is a Crosstab UI development support
through the Template Builder. Before, you could still develop the crosstab layout by manually developing some
logic to generate dynamic columns and cells based on the data. If you have been there, you know what I’m
talking about… Yes, it was such a pain to insert such logic based on your data. But now things got much better,
you can just insert the crosstab object from the toolbar and drag and drop the data element in the new UI to
generate the crosstab!

Before this exercise let’s create a new template and load a new data for crosstab layout.

1. Create a new RTF template

2. Load Crosstab_Sample_Data.xml
3. Go to File->Page Setup and choose Landscape as Orientation
4. Select Crosstab from the Template Builder tool bar. (Insert->Crosstab)
5. Drag and Drop ‘Flows’to data area
6. Drag and Drop ‘Bus Grp’ to Row Header area
7. Drag and Drop ‘Type’ to Column Header area
8. Click OK.
 Page 20 of 20

Now when you try preview it, you’ll get a crosstab layout report!

As you notice there are many text forms inserted along with the creation of crosstab.

Basically, the first row is displaying column header by having for-each-group loop with ‘Type’ element. And
then the row header of the second row is taking care of repeating Business Groups in vertical order with for-
each-group loop logic. And inside the for-each-group logic there is a for-each-group loop logic, which you can
find it in the second cell from the left in the second row. And the last cell in the second row is talking care of
sub-total, which is a total for the Business Group in the row. Lastly, the last row is similar to the first row, but the
difference is to display total for each Type column. So now you know what I was talking about! Yes, you had to
do this by yourself before, old days….. But now you don’t really need to think about the logic, you can create
the crosstab in just a matter of 5 seconds!

Conclusion
Now you have finished all the steps and should have this fancy customer balance report that has implemented
many techniques of BI Publisher and MS Word. With all the steps done with this tutorial you should be able to
develop many different varieties of BI Publisher reports and also should be able to demonstrate its strong
capability and flexibility to satisfy many different business requirements on business report. Also with this
tutorial and materials along with this training you should be confident enough to provide a training of RTF
template development to somebody else. There are more RTF template development techniques, so keep play
around with BI Publisher and you will find more fun and excitement! Have fun!