BI/XML Publisher Notes

Before going into more details of XML Publisher, lets have a look at some of the XML standards.

The XML language specification defines the rules for XML document structure and how XML processors should read the document.

The DTD (document type definition) validates an XML document and provides the relationships of elements contained in the document.

XML Namespaces helps us to distinguish elements with different definitions having same name in the XML document.

The XML Path Language (XPath) provides syntax for searching the XML documents.

The Extensible Style Sheet Language (XSL) uses XSLT (Transformations) to transform an XML document to another document.

An XML Schema describes the XML document structure using DTD and namespaces.

Oracle BI/XML Publisher

Oracle BI Publisher is a powerful report generation tool. It is a template based publishing tool available with Oracle E-Business suite. The report designing generated is mainly driven by desktop tools and XML technology. Lot of people get confused by the terms BI publisher and XML publisher, but to let you know both are same.The older version was known as XML Publisher, which is now called as BI Publisher.BI Publisher can be used as stand alone product whereas XML Publisher is always included in EBS.

Compared to traditional oracle reports, XML publisher provides output of the
file in various formats like excel, word, pdf and HTML at runtime. The data structure and presentation layer can separated unlike the standard oracle reports where data logic, presentation are in one file.

BI/XML Publisher can be integrated with E-Business suite as:

BI Publisher + Data Templates
BI Publisher + Oracle Reports
BI Publisher + OA Framework

BI/XMl Publisher can be mainly used for types of reports like Invoices,
sales orders, purchase orders, statements, pay slips, financial and business reports.