BI Publisher Advanced RTF Techniques

Whenever I have the opportunity of teaching BI Publisher, be it the "stand-alone" BI Publisher Fundamentals class or the Siebel BI Publisher Reports class, I especially enjoy the chapters on RTF Templates.

As an extra service to my students (and now to the greater public), I have put together a simple RTF template which showcases more advanced RTF template techniques. This file and other hopefully useful examples are available here.

Ever wanted to have a BIP report with table of contents?

When you download the archive and open it, you might want to start with the BI Publisher Advanced Template Formatting.rtf file and open it in MS Word. If you have BI Publisher Desktop (aka Template Builder for Word) installed, you can load the sales.xml sample file and start generating previews (see the PDF output above).

The RTF file contains several examples and explanations such as:

• Table of contents / bookmarks
• Sub-templates for header and footer (uses the HeaderFooter.rtf file which must be reachable)
• Working with shapes
• Checkboxes
• Conditional formatting
• Page totals
• Dynamic Excel output
• Variables

The archive also contains example output files in case you don't have access to BI Publisher Desktop. In addition, you will find several other example files in the archive.

Make sure you also check out the splendid BI Publisher tutorials and other resources which I compiled here.

have a nice day

@lex