BI Publisher: Merge PDF's - Why would I ever want to do that?

When you first read that BI Publisher has the ability to merge PDF documents it's neat but you think, "I’ll never use that." Well not necessarily. Remember merging files together is new functionality in the EBS suite. Nobody knows that developers have this kind of power at there finger tips now. But it still gets a back to why would you ever want to do this. There are really two main reasons to merge PDF documents:

1. Automation
2. Desperate Content (documents in different systems)

Let’s just say you’re dealing with PDF attachments in EBS Suite. The business has requested that when there is an attachment they want it to be apart of some other standard document. Well, you can’t do that in reports6i with PDF’s but in BI Publisher this is a no brainer. You grab the blob, write out to file and then call the PDFDocMerger Utility.

Here’s a more long winded scenario. Your company works with hazardous materials. Some chemicals are so volatile that if there ever was a spill, having a MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) with the shipper/driver might be extremely helpful to authorities to resolve the situation quickly and safely. However you shipping personnel on the floor are just absolutely swamped and there is potential to miss that step. Well, the document merger might be nice tool solve that issue. Now the shipping personnel don’t have to worry about finding an MSDS on the system to give to the driver. This happens automatically based on some business logic coded in a concurrent program that generates a BOL and then finds a MSDS and merges the two documents before printing (Automation and Desperate Content). The shipping personal go right to the printer and pick up one document!

Normally, I would paste some sort of code snippet here. But the BI Publisher documentation for the PDFDocMerger API is really good and implementing it is very simple.

Good Luck!

Ike