24 New Features in BI Publisher Release 10.1.3.3.1

This chapter describes features of BI Publisher that were introduced in Release 10.1.3.3.1 and that apply to Releases 10.1.3.3.1 through 10.1.3.4. Information about these features is also provided in the BI Publisher documentation set that has been updated for Release 10.1.3.4. This chapter contains the following sections:

• Section 24.1, "Time Out Value for Web Service Data Sources"

• Section 24.2, "Bidirectional Function for eText Data Fields"

• Section 24.3, "Default Repository"

24.1 Time Out Value for Web Service Data Sources

You can now set a time out value when creating a data set based on a Web service. The Data Set Details definition page contains the "Time Out" field. The default is 60 seconds. Enter a numeric value to equal the number of seconds that BI Publisher waits for a response from the Web service before giving up.

To set the time out value for a Web service data set:

1. Navigate to the report, and select Edit.

2. Under the report Data Model region, select the Web service data set.

3. In the Details region, enter the desired time out period in seconds (default is 60 seconds).

24.2 Bidirectional Function for eText Data Fields

Starting with Release 10.1.3.3.1, you can use a BIDI function to preserve the correct order of characters for bidirectional languages in eText templates. If you have data fields that contain bidirectional data (for example, Arabic or Hebrew fields), then you can use the BIDI function to preserve the correct right to left ordering of the characters.

To use the BIDI function, enter the following in the template for each field that contains data to be treated as bidirectional:

BIDI(ELEMENT_NAME)

For example:

<POSITION>  <LENGTH>  <FORMAT>  <PAD>    <DATA>                <COMMENTS>
     9        21        Alpha     L,' '  BIDI(VENDOR_ADDRESS)  Vendor Address 

In this example, the data for the element VENDOR_ADDRESS is treated as bidirectional.

24.3 Default Repository

BI Publisher now sets a default repository location.

The repository path is defined in the xmlp-server-config.xml file as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><xmlpConfig xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/xmlp"> <resource>    <file path="${oracle.home}/xdo/repository"/> </resource></xmlpConfig>

If the "oracle.home" Java system property is set to a valid path, then ${oracle.home} is replaced with that value.

When BI Publisher is deployed on OC4J, ${oracle.home} is automatically set to a directory path where OC4J is installed.

For example, in an OC4J deployment in which the OC4J home is C:\oc4j, the BI Publisher repository is automatically set to:

C:\oc4j\xdo\repository

Note that the repository can also be set through BI Publisher Admin screens as shown in the following figure:

Figure 24-1 Setting the BI Publisher Report Repository Through the Admin Screen