Monday 23 June 2008

Previewing and testing eText templates

Just a quick post today.

I've had a few emails asking how we test eText templates.

Rather than using the Word Plug in to preview the result, you test eText templates using the 'Template Viewer' included with the BIP desktop toolkit.

From the Windows Start menu, click on : All Programs, Oracle BI Publisher Desktop, Template Viewer:

Menu

Once the Template Viewer is open:
- select your working directory i.e. the folder containing your eText template and preview XML data
- change the output format to eText :

Template_Viewer

and then click on the button 'Start Processing' to view the generated text file with Unix / Linux line endings:

Result

3 comments:

The $cribbler said...

Hi Kevin..

Definitely an applause to you for your help in explaining the whole process of testing..but while I followed your steps, i encountered an error..i.e.I could not browse my template and xml file..the target folder was empty when it was containing the files. Please suggest me what should I do in that case...I ts quite urgent...so waiting for your help..

Anonymous said...

i am not sure where is hould post me question, so am doing it here.

I have to pick the last 10 characters of a string to print on the etext. substr with -10 does not work. tried to lpad (so ican do a substr with a positive number)but lpad also does not work on the column value.

Anonymous said...

When I test using the Template Viewer, it says "Successfully generated..." and then "Spawning viewer" then "End of Process", but finally when the results are displayed, it displays the template itself and not the results. Any clue what could have gone wrong?