BI Publisher : Formatting Issues
- by Manoj Madhusoodanan
While creating BI Publisher reports the formatting issues are quite common.Here I am discussing some common issues related to BIP report development.
1) First issue is related to column formatting.When you want to display some data which has leading zeros or trailing zeros after '.' in EXCEL output you will not get the desired output.But in PDF it will come as what you are expecting.This is not with the issue of your data. This is due to the unique nature of EXCEL cell format.When you are trying to put a text data in a cell with out making any change to cell format it will treat as number and it will truncate all leading zeros and all trailing zeros after '.' . So what you have to do is to convert that data into a format which EXCEL can treat as text.
Eg: If you want to display 0020100 convert this data into ="0020100". Same way for 23789.02300 to ="23789.02300". Note: This is applicable to EXCEL output only.If you have multiple output type apply it only for EXCEL.
2) Second is related to report size issue in PDF output type.If the number of columns are more and if you want to show most of the columns in one row andif it is a PDF output you can choose the paper size as Legal (8.5 x 14''). You will get more spaces in the template to accommodate more columns.
3) If your XML data contains special characters like &,<,> etc .. pass the data to DBMS_XMLGEN.CONVERT function.It will replace special characters with corresponding XML notations.
Eg: (a>b) & (c!=d) to (a>b) & (c!=d)
