Happy New Year! Wow, another eventful year gone by , yet there's so much to do, so much more to learn!
Embedding images within BI Publisher templates is old hat now and very well documented - this blog post is specific to using BIP within eBusiness Suite and accessing images dynamically using $OA_MEDIA (or any other environment variable).
The Oracle XML Publisher Report Designer's Guide has a section on using OA_MEDIA reference to load images dynmically from the application server using the following syntax:
url:{concat('${OA_MEDIA}','/',IMAGE_FILE)}
However the documentation does not mention how to use this reference when previewing the template from the BIP desktop plugin for MS Word. When I asked some developers what they did to preview their images I found that most of them either did not preview images on the desktop or if they did, they would change the Alternative text (Alt-text) region of the dummy image in the RTF template!
A simple configuration allows you to use the OA_MEDIA reference on the desktop to preview your images and to use the same template on all platforms.
XDO.cfg setup to reference $OA_MEDIA on BIP desktop
Embedding images within BI Publisher templates is old hat now and very well documented - this blog post is specific to using BIP within eBusiness Suite and accessing images dynamically using $OA_MEDIA (or any other environment variable).
The Oracle XML Publisher Report Designer's Guide has a section on using OA_MEDIA reference to load images dynmically from the application server using the following syntax:
url:{concat('${OA_MEDIA}','/',IMAGE_FILE)}
However the documentation does not mention how to use this reference when previewing the template from the BIP desktop plugin for MS Word. When I asked some developers what they did to preview their images I found that most of them either did not preview images on the desktop or if they did, they would change the Alternative text (Alt-text) region of the dummy image in the RTF template!
A simple configuration allows you to use the OA_MEDIA reference on the desktop to preview your images and to use the same template on all platforms.
XDO.cfg setup to reference $OA_MEDIA on BIP desktop
1. Copy the LOGO images to a directory on your desktop – say C:\XDO\Images
2. Look for “xdo example.cfg” under “C:\Program Files (x86)\Oracle\BI Publisher\BI Publisher Desktop\Template Builder for Word\config” or “"C:\Program Files\Oracle\XML Publisher Desktop\Template Builder for Word\config” depending on the BIP desktop version you have installed.
3. Copy “xdo example.cfg” to “xdo.cfg”
4. Modify xdo.cfg -(a) Look for system-temp-dir and give it a valid directory name
e.g. <property name="system-temp-dir">c:\temp</property>
(b) Look for </properties>
(c) Add a line above that
<property name="user-variable.OA_MEDIA">file:///C:\XDO\images</property>
Note: The directory name MUST match the location of your images on the desktop
e.g. <property name="system-temp-dir">c:\temp</property>
(b) Look for </properties>
(c) Add a line above that
<property name="user-variable.OA_MEDIA">file:///C:\XDO\images</property>
Note: The directory name MUST match the location of your images on the desktop
5. Save xdo.cfg
With this configuration, you have set $OA_MEDIA to C:\XDO\images on your desktop. You can now preview logos in BIP desktop before loading the RTF template into eBusiness Suite.
