Where are my sub templates?
- by Tim Dexter
This one is for standalone/BIEE uses of Publisher. All the ERP/CRM/HCM folks are already catered for and can tuck into a nut cutlet and arugala salad. Sorry, I have just watched Food Inc and even if only half of it is true; Im still on a crusade in my house against mass produced food. Wake up World!
If you have ventured into the world of sub templating, you'll be reaping some development benefit. In terms of shared report components and calculations they are very useful. Just exporting all of your report headers and footers to a single sub template can potentially save you hours and hours of work and make you look like a star. If someone in management gets it into their head that they would like Comic San Serif font rather than Arial in their report headers, its a 10 min job rather than 100 hours!
What about the rest of the report content? I hear you cry. Its coming in 11g, full master template support. Your management wants bright blue borders with yellow backgrounds for all the tables in your reports, 5 minute job!
Getting back to sub templates and my comment about all the ERP/CRM/HCM folks be catered for. In the standalone release there is no out of the box directory for you to drop your sub templates. Dropping them into the main report directory would make sense but they are not accessible there via a URL. An oversight on our part and something that will be addressed in 11g. Sub templates are now a first class citizen in the world of BIP, you can upload them and BIP will know what to do with them. But what do you do right now?
The easiest place to put them where BIP can 'see' them is to create a directory under the xmlpserver install directory in the J2EE container e.g.
$J2EE_HOME/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/subtemplates
You can call it whatever you want but when the server is started up, that directory is accessible via a URL i.e. http://tdexter:9704/xmlpserver/subtemplates/mysub.rtf. You can therefore put it into the top of your main templates and call the sub template.
<?import: http://tdexter:9704/xmlpserver/subtemplates/mysub.rtf?>
Of course, you can drop them anywhere you want, they just need to be in a web server mountable directory. Enjoy the arugala!
