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About the Siebel Reports Server

Oracle's Siebel applications ship with standard reports. To modify these reports or add new reports, you need to use Siebel Tools and Actuate e.Report Designer Professional as described in this topic.

You create and modify reports in two locations:

• In Siebel Tools, by creating and modifying Report or other object definitions and setting properties within them. These object definitions are executed at run time.
• In Actuate e.Report Designer Professional, by creating and modifying Report Object Design (ROD) files, which are then compiled and executed.

Although changes may be made only in Siebel Tools or in Actuate e.Report Designer Professional, frequently report redesign work requires making changes and additions in both places.

Siebel Tools modifications use the Report, Report Field, Report Locale, Sub Report, Sub Report Field, View Report, and View Report Locale object types. These modifications affect the following areas:

• Defining the structure of the data exported from the Siebel application to the Actuate report, which the Actuate report receives into its datastreams
• Attaching reports to the Reports menu for specific views

ROD file modifications in Actuate e.Report Designer Professional alter various classes and subclasses that define report behavior, appearance, data acquisition, and so on for one report.

Actuate e.Report Designer Professional is a visual design editor from which object-oriented Actuate BASIC code is generated and compiled from the report design (ROD file) and referenced library classes (ROL, or Report Object Library, files) into an executable report program. The resulting executable program is an ROX (Report Object Executable) file. When the executable program is run, the result is an instance file containing both report specifications and data. The instance file is in ROI (Report Object Instance) format, suitable for display in the Actuate Viewer on a Microsoft Windows client (Mobile Web Client). When the instance file is requested by a Web browser (directly from the Siebel Reports Server in Siebel Web client environments), it is converted to browser-specific DHTML format from the ROI. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Actuate Report Generation and Display Steps

As shown in Figure 1, the ROI file generated by in the interactive mode can be sent directly to the Siebel Reports Server for long-term storage and availability. The ROI file is also accessed by Web browsers and thin clients. When in the Siebel Web Client, the user specifies whether immediate display or Siebel Reports Server processing is required when requesting the report.