Oracle XML Publisher is Oracle’s tool for the production and delivery of all types of Business Reporting requirements within Oracle E-Business Suite. It can produce a wide variety of business documents, from Invoices and Purchase Orders to Contracts and Tax Forms.

Some key features are:

• Report layouts can be designed using familiar desktop tools
• It can accept and process any well-formed XML data file, or even generate the data itself
• The report output can be delivered to the end recipient via printer, email, fax or it can even be published to your company Portal
• The output can be created in a wide variety of file formats, including Adobe Acrobat PDF, MS Word, MS Excel and HTML
• The transformation of XML data to one of the required output format is based on XML Stylesheets Transformations (XSL), an open industry standard

XML Publisher comes in various versions, as well as bundled as part of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, under the new name “BI Publisher”. However, I am going to concentrate on the version that is embedded within E-Business Suite. Up to and including Apps 11.5.9, XML Publisher was not particularly well integrated into the application; since 11.5.10 it has been fully integrated into the underlying infrastructure, closely linked to the Concurrent Manager.

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