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

Siebel Open UI Developer's Handbook - Announcement

It is not without some parental joy that we announce a new Siebel CRM book to be published this winter.

Together with three of the most distinguished Siebel Open UI experts, this humble writer is currently working on putting together useful information and case studies for the upcoming book:

Oracle Siebel Open UI Developer's Handbook

In this book, you will:

• Learn all about the Siebel Open UI Architecture
• Learn to create custom Presentation Models and Physical Renderers
• Learn advanced techniques for Open UI customization
• Understand how to apply custom styles and themes
• Customize and deploy Siebel Mobile Applications
• Integrate Siebel Open UI with external applications
• and more (see below)

As a frequent reader of this blog, you know that the book authors are truly committed to sharing information:

• Duncan Ford
• Alexander Hansal
• Kirk Leibert
• Jan Peterson

We expect the book to be published in Winter 2014/2015 and plan to align it with Siebel CRM Innovation Pack 2014. We are happy to announce as well that you can participate in shaping the book's content and get notified when it is available by filling in a simple form.

Please feel encouraged to grab this opportunity and create a book designed by and for the Siebel developer community.

• Learn more about the book on the publisher's product page.
• View the official press release.
• Fill in the pre-order and feedback form.

have a nice day

@lex

Siebel CRM Patchset 9 is Available

Last Friday, Oracle has made Siebel Patchset 9 (8.1.1.11.9/8.2.2.4.9 - IP 2013) for July 2014 available on My Oracle Support.

The "Readme" document (Oracle Support login required) lists the bugs resolved which are/were in the following areas:

• Open UI
• Mobile Applications
• Marketing
• UCM
• Others

Naturally, Open UI and Mobile Applications got a lot of attention from the good people at Oracle. So if you're missing some functionality or encounter bugs: Time to patch!

have a nice day

@lex

ec4u Releases Application Composer for Siebel Open UI

Earlier this year, I have been invited by ec4u expert consulting AG Germany to take part in a workshop. My job was to deliver Siebel Open UI training as well as discuss a new tool that ec4u planned to implement.

The tool should enable administrative users to quickly change the appearance of list and form applets in Siebel Open UI without having to use Siebel Tools. I was intrigued and inspired by the presentation of the tool during the workshop.

Just recently, ec4u has released the new tool, which now goes by the name 'Application Composer for Siebel Open UI'.

As we can learn from the fact sheet, the Application Composer provides an administrative view (and underlying data model) to store personalization/customization metadata for list and form applets.

Administrators can for example define which applet controls shall be hidden for certain responsibilities, positions, languages or organizations.

It is also possible to make fields mandatory, read-only or change the labels at runtime.

Form applet with changes made by ec4u Application Composer

ec4u makes the solution available to Siebel CRM customers and packages it with a deployment tool and consulting services.

For more information, please contact Markus Schneeweis.

have a nice day

@lex

Siebel UI Innovations

Here is some amazing OpenUI experiments. 

is it windows 8?? no its siebel 

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7. 

Holiday Break

Siebel Essentials celebrates its 6th year(!) with a recreational break as it has become kind of a tradition.

A big "Thank You" goes out to all readers, fellow bloggers and supporters.

See you again soon.

have a nice day

@lex

Oldie but Goldie: Siebel Quick Print

This is another "blast from the past" moment, when we look at an old post from 2008. But Siebel Quick Print is too good to forget (and yes, it works in Siebel Open UI too).

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Introduced in Siebel 7.7 and greatly enhanced in 7.8, the Quick Print feature allows end users to bring the data they see in the Siebel view to paper (or Excel, HTML or - if a pdf writer is installed - to PDF).

Quick Print seems to be somewhat neglected in most projects, as it comes with default settings that are not very attractive. The screenshot below shows the result of pressing the Quick Print toolbar button in the Account > Orders view.


Not very impressive indeed, but let's set the user preferences for Printing as follows (note that we use HTML output which also allows to print form applets; Excel output is only supported for list applets).

Now you're talking

As we see, Quick Print is capable of producing a fully featured report-style printout of the entire view, even if it contains HTML icons or side-by-side applets.

Hierarchical list in quick print


Side-by-side applets in quick print

Have fun

@lex