Many Oracle products integrate with BI Publisher to provide the reporting functionality needed for the product. Many products also provide prepackaged reports. You can opt to customize the reports.
To customize the prepackaged reports, you have three options:
Customize the original report.
Oracle strongly discourages modifying the original reports provided with Oracle products because any modifications are overwritten when Oracle provides a patch that updates the original report. If you choose to modify the original report, you must reapply your report changes when a patch updates the original report.
Copy the report and customize the copy.
To avoid the risk of overwriting your customizations, an alternative is to make a copy of the report and customize the copy. With this option, you must also consider whether the original report is called by an application or process (such as the Oracle Enterprise Scheduler). These processes are typically coded with the report catalog path, therefore to enable them to execute your custom report, you must also make additional customizations to the calling application code to point to the customized copy of the report in the catalog.
Use the Customize feature.
To facilitate the customization of prepackaged application reports, BI Publisher provides the Customize feature. When you select the Customize option for a report, BI Publisher creates a copy of the report in the "Custom" folder. This custom copy is linked internally to the original report. You can customize the custom copy of the report, leaving the original report intact. When users initiate a request to run the original report, whether from the BI Publisher catalog or through an application process, BI Publisher detects the customized version and runs your custom version instead.
The Customize feature provides the following benefits:
Enables a customization process that mimics the convenience of an "in-place" customization. BI Publisher automatically creates the copy and the mapping.
Removes the requirement to edit calling processes or applications to execute the custom report. Although you customize the copy, BI Publisher automatically sends all requests to run the original report to the custom copy instead.
Removes the risk of patches overwriting your customizations.