I am a firm believer in automating that which can be automated. Fortunately for me the design of an FDMEE implementation is stored in the supporting tables within the FDMEE Schema that is created with during the FDMEE install and is updated as integrations are built.
When I reviewed the reports that come Out of the Box in FDMEE I found that they met some of my needs but were also lacking in layout and data elements. So I spent some time looking into how the reports in FDMEE are generated.
The report engine in FDMEE is an OEM version of Oracle BI Publisher. The nice thing about BI Publisher is that it separates the query design from the report layout design from the translation files. Then at runtime these are brought together to produce a report output.
The enterprise version of BI Publish is very robust allowing for a large number of sources with several different layout design tools and layout template types producing many different report outputs to a variety of destinations.
BI Publisher within FDMEE is limited to SQL Query against the FDMEE Schema using MSWord RTF Templates to produce output in either PDF, HTML, Excel or XLSX format to the local file system FDMEE\outbox\reports.
The next series of posts I will show how to create a custom report within FDMEE using the following steps:
- Creating a Query Definition
- Designing a Report Layout
- Creating a Report Definition
