BI Publisher Overview

Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BI Publisher, formerly XML Publisher) is an enterprise reporting solution that streamlines report and form generation. A primary feature of Oracle's BI Publisher product is the separation of the data extraction process from the report layout. BI Publisher enables you to design and create report layout templates with the more common desktop applications of Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, and renders XML data based on those templates. With a single template, it can generate reports in many formats (PDF, RTF, Excel, HTML, and so on) in many languages. This approach to reporting can dramatically reduce report maintenance, enabling power business users to adjust report templates without involvement of IT resources.

Image: BI Publisher concept

The following diagram illustrates the concept of BI Publisher.

Select features of Oracle's BI Publisher product have been integrated into and enhanced for use with PeopleTools.

Image: Integration with BI Publisher

This diagram illustrates the integration of PeopleSoft applications with BI Publisher.

PeopleSoft BI Publisher has a direct Java integration to the XDO Engine and XDO Parser. The BI Publisher Desktop requires installation and can be downloaded from a PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture page.

PeopleSoft Query as well as any PeopleTools based applications providing XML data are available to BI Publisher as a data source. BI Publisher for PeopleSoft Enterprise provides an environment for managing templates, data sources, reports, translations, and content components. It also offers an electronic bursting capability to produce reports according to a user-defined criteria and secure the reports using an application’s security join table. A set of PeopleCode BI Publisher classes for runtime report generation is also provided.

Image: BI Components

This diagram illustrates the BI components within the PeopleSoft system.

Oracle provides a set of PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture pages for defining data sources, report definitions, templates, and translations and for running and viewing reports. Oracle also provides a set of PeopleCode application program interfaces (APIs) that wrap the Oracle XDO engine APIs. These APIs are used by the BI Publisher PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture pages and are available for advanced report developers to use for custom applications and batch processes.