Choosing a Template

Because report definition information is available from the PeopleCode BI Publisher classes, you can incorporate prompts on runtime pages to select reports and templates. You must pass in XML data and a choice of report template to the BI Publisher core engine to generate the output in a desired format.

You can retrieve a particular template file or expose a choice of templates at runtime. Only active reports and templates are retrieved. An as of date is also required to coordinate with the template file’s effective date. If not supplied, the as of date is assumed to be the system date. At runtime, the template as of date is used to select the appropriate active effective-dated template and sub-template that is current as of that date.

A PeopleCode class is available to retrieve a report’s template IDs based on a channel value, although it is not exposed on a PeopleSoft PeopleTools-delivered Pure Internet Architecture page. You can also incorporate template administration functionality directly into your application pages. This functionality includes creating the definitions and storing the related files, as well as querying to find the templates associated with a report definition.