37 Bursting and Distributing a Report

Oracle Reports enables you to deliver a single report to multiple destinations simultaneously. By taking advantage of this feature, you can create a single report, then send it in any format (layout driven formats, such as PDF or HTML, as well as data model driven formats, such as XML or delimited) to multiple destinations.

In this example, you will modify a simple report we have provided to burst each group to a separate report. You will then modify a sample distribution XML file to send an e-mail to each destination with an attachment based on the separate reports. You will also send multiple e-mails to the same e-mail address with a single attachment (the entire report).

Concepts

Oracle Reports enables you to deliver a single report to multiple destinations simultaneously. Using the distribution feature, you can set up your report to be distributed to an e-mail destination, a portal, a printer, or anywhere else when the report is run. This feature also enables you to improve performance, since you fetch the data only once for many different formats and destinations. Using distribution also reduces your maintenance overhead because you need only one job request to publish the report to multiple destinations. You can refine this further by sending the Header section to some recipients, the Main section to others, and the entire report to an entirely different recipient list.

For more information on bursting and distribution, see "Creating Advanced Distributions" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Publishing Reports to the Web with Oracle Reports Services manual, available .

Example Scenario

In this example, you are the report developer for a manufacturing company who needs to deliver monthly information to its warehouses. You will modify an existing report to burst on each warehouse ID, creating separate PDF reports for each warehouse. You will then edit the distribution XML file we have provided to e-mail each report as an attachment to the corresponding warehouses.

As you build this example report, you will:

• Set Up an Existing Report for Bursting on a warehouse group.

• Edit the Distribution XML Definition.

• Run the Report to PDF format so that the report is e-mailed to the destinations defined in the distribution.xml file.

To see a sample distribution report, open the examples folder named distribution, then open source\inventory_report_dist.rdf for report you will distribute, or result\inventory_report_dist.rdf for the report you will burst. For details on how to open these reports, see "Accessing the Example Reports" in the Preface. The example files used in this chapter are listed and described in Table 37-1.