46 Building a Report with a Text Pluggable Data Source

In this chapter, you will learn about reports that include data from a Text pluggable data source (PDS), which is provided with Oracle Reports. By following the steps in this chapter, you can generate the report output shown in Figure 46-1.

Figure 46-1 Report output using a Text PDS

Description of Figure 46-1 follows
Description of "Figure 46-1 Report output using a Text PDS"

Concepts

Example Scenario

In this example, you have downloaded the US Census Bureau data in CSV (comma-separated values) format and want to generate a report. You will learn how to use character-delimited text as a data source to create a paper report.

As you build this example report, you will:

To see a sample report that uses a Text PDS, open the examples folder named text_pds, then open census_report.rdf. For details on how to open it, see "Accessing the Example Reports" in the Preface. The example files used in this chapter are listed and described in Table 46-1.

Table 46-1 Example report files

File Description

text_pds\census_report.rdf

The finished RDF for your report.

text_pds\census_report.pdf

A PDF version of your finished report.

text_pds\census_csv.txt

The character-delimited data downloaded from the US Census Bureau Web site.

text_pds\config.txt

Code for the textpds.conf file.