BI Publisher: XDOXSLT:IS_NUMERIC Not Handling Negative Numbers

We have an inbuilt function IS_NUMERIC in BI Publisher template builder.  This function is mainly used to validate whether a given value is a numeric value or not. Based on that, this function will return either TRUE or FALSE.

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BI Publisher: Handling NULL XML Value

There will be three possible scenarios for the value of an element in a XML data, 

1. XML tag value present in the XML data, and it has a value which is not NULL
for ex:
<PO_NUMBER>123</PO_NUMBER>

Suppose you want to give some condition to check not null similar to the one we give in PL/SQL as,
IF value IS NOT NULL THEN
---
---
END IF;
BI Publisher syntax for this is,

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BI Publisher: Formatting Date

We can format dates in BI Publishes in the following three different ways,

1. Formatting Date using Microsoft Word’s native date format mask.
2. Formatting Date using Oracle’s format-date function.
3. Formatting Date using Oracle’s abstract date format masks.
4. Format with Calendar.

Lets me now explain little details about the above three ways, and below is the XML I am going to use in the below examples,
<ROWSET>
    <NORMAL_DATE>2011-01-26</NORMAL_DATE>
    <DATE_UTC>2011-01-26T18:00:00-08:00</DATE_UTC>
    <DATE_TEXT>26/Jan/2011</DATE_TEXT>
</ROWSET>

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BI Publisher: Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting can be used in the layout builder for various scenarios. Some of the scenario I could think of is,
1. Display/hide layout regions based on condition.
2. Display/hide boilerplate text based on condition.
3. Apply visual attributes based on condition.
4. Hide table row or column based on condition.

In the below paragraphs we will see how above scenarios can he achieved in BI Publisher.

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How-To: Configure New Font On BI Desktop Publisher

In most of the projects we will come across building a report having Barcode or MICR font.

So once you install your new font under Windows/Fonts/ directory you will still not be seeing that font when you preview PDF output.

What to do in that case?
Here are the steps to follow on installing new font on your PC/Laptop.

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Cross Tab / Column wrapping

Today got a interesting issue/challenge from good friend and colleague Mr. Pinaaki krishnasharma. Issue is if we use a for loop @column and print the rows as column for say Cross Tab reports, the columns that were not able to fit in the page width is going out of the page. See below for example,

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Inline If Else Statment

This week I had come across an issue where I had a situation in the template to put 2 inline if statements one after the other.

 

Some statement if@inline:1=2 Result 1 end if if@inline:1=1 Result 1 end if

 

But in the output it printed both results of if statements. I do not know the reason for this. So as usual went for google and landed in our guru Tim Dexter's Dec 2007 post.

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Printing Check Amount With Decimal Part

Yesterday was not really a good day for me. because a simple fix on the check amount dragged my entire day till 10pm. But it kinda helped me to explore lot of stuff.

Let me come straight to the actual problem.

Currently we are showing the checkamount padded with asterisk(*) like *******1200 (I will use this value for by below examples). Here is how I pad the asterisk

<?xdofx:lpad(PaymentAmount/Value,12,'*')?>

Since there is no decimal part in this value the bank some times considers the last 2 digits from the right as the decimal part. In this case they consider 00 as decimal part and paid only 12 dollar. To avoid this confusion we decided to print the decimal part also so that the amount will look like ****1200.00

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Handling Text Wrapping with Fixed Rows in BI Desktop Publisher

After seeing Tim Dexter post about fixed line and row filler decided to post about the handling string wrapping in the template.

Ok let me start explaining how I handle the string wrapping. Before that let me let me tell you the requirement.

1. Need to display fixed lines.

2. If there are only few lines and the page is not filled then we need to print blank lines to fill the page.

3. At the end of the report we need to display the summary as shown above.

4. At the end of the rows including the rows with values and blank rows we need to print a line to end the box.

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XSL function to convert number to word

For long time we have been searching for one function which can be used to convert the number into words. You all might know why this function is mandatory.

Yes this helps a lot when you are doing a check print report. Lot of them posted questions on oracle forum. The great Gareth, gave a suggestion to use package from database & convert into the words. Everybody thought they need to create some custom function for this. But AP module have its own function ap_amount_utilities_pkg.ap_convert_number to do this.

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