Welcome

Welcome to the Oracle Reports Tutorial. This manual will help you get started using Oracle Reports, as well as introduce you to publishing data to the Web and paper.

Note:

For the latest updates to the Oracle Reports Tutorial, refer to the Oracle Technology Network (http://otn.oracle.com/products/reports/), then click Getting Started with Oracle Reports and use the index to navigate to the Oracle Reports Tutorial.

This preface includes the following sections

Intended Audience

This manual is intended for those users who are new to Oracle Reports, as well as those who are familiar with previous versions, but would like to learn more about some of the major new features in Oracle Reports 10g (9.0.4).

Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible, with good usability, to the disabled community. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle Corporation is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For additional information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/.

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

JAWS, a Windows screen reader, may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, JAWS may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle Corporation does not own or control. Oracle Corporation neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites. `

Prerequisites

The exercises in the tutorial use the Human Resources sample schema provided with the Oracle9i database and an HTML template. We've also provided a text file containing the SQL you will enter, as well as the JSPs you create in every chapter.

You can download these files from the Oracle Technology Network (http://otn.oracle.com/products/reports), then click Getting Started with Oracle Reports. Navigate to the index, then click Examples. On the Examples page, you will see a link to the Oracle Reports Tutorial. You can also find the files on the Documentation CD that came with the product. We recommend that you copy the files into a local directory, such as d:\Reports_Tutorial.

Sample Schema

This tutorial relies on the data contained in the Human Resources section of the sample schema. This sample schema is provided with the Oracle9i database.

Viewing Web Reports

To produce the Web-based report, you must have a Web browser installed on your machine. The minimum and recommended requirements are:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x or higher

Netscape Communicator 4.x or higher

Viewing the Web Source

Although you can view the Web source for your JSP report in Reports Builder, this tutorial also shows you how to analyze your Web source in a text editor. We recommend you use a text editor like NotePad (on Windows NT) or UltraEdit.

Structure

This manual contains the following chapters.

Chapter 1, "Tutorial Overview"

This chapter describes the tutorial scenario and what the chapters will help you achieve.

Lesson Chapters

The lesson chapters contain the procedures for producing the reports. These chapters step you through the Report Wizard, adding report blocks, and the Graph Wizard. If you are already familiar with using these features, you can use the Quick Reference guide, located in Appendix A.

Output Review Chapters

The output review chapters review what you did in the lesson chapters. These chapters explain the JSP tags and code for the JSP-based Web report.