Thursday, October 1, 2009

Useful Function Support in RTF Layout Templates

Hey Bippers!

I was looking up how to ltrim a field in the layout template this morning and ran across a very useful page that you should all have bookmarked! Some of you may have already seen this or bookmarked it, but I know sometimes you can just get overwhelmed with all of the information out there and overlook very handy things.

Our friends at Oracle have documented "Extended SQL and XSL Functions", "XSL Equivalents" and "Using FO Elements" here:


Bookmark it because you never know when you'll need a quick reference to accomplish the tasks listed!

Until we meet again....
BipGirl

Friday, September 25, 2009

BIP and Excel Output

Has anyone else experienced issues when outputting your data in Excel Format from Oracle Apps?


I have run into 2 issues lately with data converting to a number and I wanted to pass along how I resolved them...


1. Text converting to a number and dropping the leading zero
2. Text converting to a number and right aligning in Excel


1. The first issue is that when I want to report a number, say 0123456, it returns in my output as 123456. If this is a company's id number, reporting the number like that isn't going to fly.

* To correct this issue, I added the following statement to my Add Help Text Field

< direction="ltr" bidi="bidi-override">

< ?FIELD_NAME? >

< /fo:bidi-override >

My data now will display as 0123456 in the Excel Output

2. The second issue I ran into was that my Excel Output was displaying the correct data, but it was right-aligning the data in the spreadsheet as if it were a number when it was really text.

* To correct this issue, I added the following statement to my Add Help Text field

to ensure that it analyzed my text AS TEXT!

< ?concat(FIELD_NAME,' ')? >

This will concatenate 2 spaces (yes, you need 2 spaces!) to the end of your field that it is analyzing as a number and now analyze it as text and left-align it in the Excel Output.

I hope you found this helpful.. I will post any other Excel tips I discover!


*note: the statements have an extra space after the <> in order

for the statements to post correctly. Please remove them when using in

your layout template.