Tuesday, January 20, 2009

BI Publisher: Data Templates vs. Reports6i

Top 5 Reasons to use Data Templates over Reports6i

To start off there are more than 5 reasons!

1. Displaying a reports in real-time
2. Advanced PL/SQL
3. Easy of use
4. Multiple Integration Points
5. No Binary Conversions
6. Used across multiple platforms
7. Integration with multiple data sources
8. Excellent debugging facilities
9. Eliminates Ambiguous Crashing (who doesn't love terminated by signal 11)

I forgot to mention a couple of other benefit about data templates vs reports6i that we haven't ever discussed. Data templates are the only way a developer can generate the xml in real-time in the eBusiness suite or locally on there pc. In comparison, a developer always has to submit a concurrent request in order to generate an xml file with reports6i.

Other benefits of using data templates would be that the logic has to be put into a pl/sql package, whice essentially makes the business logic globally available to all other objects in the database. This provides an amazing code reduction. Developers can create other data templates (that are similar but different) and reuse existing business logic.

Ike