BI Publisher: Common Use for Bursting API

This is an excerpt of a post requesting to do three things in one shot (grab an xml, apply a template, send it to the printer). This exactly what bursting was designed for. Because of the obscurity of how to use the java api's for BI Publisher, people overlook the fact that you can call a majority of the api's through the command line. Nearly every BI Publisher api that is documented has a main method.

Question:

I have xml documents coming in on a linux directory. I would like to take the raw xml data and apply a template and send it to a printer.

Questions are:

1. Since there is no way to tell when the xml documents will appear for processing, is there any way I can make the BIP poll the linux directory to check for incoming files?

2. How can I apply a template and make the raw xml data beautiful?

3. Finally, after template application, I need to take the output and send it to a printer. I believe I will have to use delivery manager api's to do it.

Can someone help with the three questions?

Response:

I don't know if the xml gateway will solve your problem as "punit" suggested. don't worry though, this problem can get solved pretty easily, Chin up cowboy.

I would setup an autosys job that calls a shell script that loops through the files in a directory and executes a command line argument for the busting api's.

It's going to expect the following arguments:

java oracle.apps.xdo.batch.DocumentProcessor [-debug] -tempdir -datafile

you may need to resolve the whole path. echo $JAVA_TOP. That it's, there's really not much to the api.

BI Publisher: More for-each tags

Okay, you may be wondering what is up with the iFrames. Totally, annoying I know. However, blogspot has a tendency to replace the < ? ? > all of the time. This site is not straight HTML it's XHTML. Which is cool but it has it's own issues. I'm only doing the iFrames so you can cut and copy and paste.

Like other disclaimers, nothing here is guaranteed to work it's an overview or tutorial. If you feel like something is wacked out, send me a shout, I will fix it and give you mad props.

Please excuse the iFrame for the tutorial. See below.

BI Publisher: Understanding the for-each tag

This should be viewed as a supplement guide to oracle standard documentation! For-each in BI Publisher (and xml in general or basic programming) causes a lot of issues for new developers or business analysts. The key to understanding xml and bi publisher is “Context.”

Vocabulary
Context: Context is used to describe where you currently at in a set of relationships. As an example: Right now your sitting down in a chair , in some room or cube, which is in building, which is in some city, some state, some country, well you get the picture.
Hierarchal Relationships: Things that exist between one more objects. An example would be a parent an child. Child is a product of the parent.
Root: is the start or the beginning of something. An example lets get to the root of the problem.
Node/Element: Basically an item of some sort. Your keys are elements of your key chain.

Let’s Get Started
The for-each tag is used to loop through and xml document. An xml document always has a root node or starting node (see bold green). All xml documents have heirachal relationships. In the example below we can see the following: an Employee is a child of dept and dept is a child of corporation. Every employee, dept and corporation have elements and these elements are typically unique to them (hence the coloring scheme).

Cont...Please scroll through