An Overview of Report Manager

An Oracle White Paper

July 2008

Table of Contents

Overview………………………………………………………………………………..2

Report Types……………………………………………………………………………2

Report manager Availability……………………………………………………………3

Dependencies……………………………………………………………………………3

Report manager Set up…………………………………………………………………..4

Usability (Functionalities)………………………………………………………………7

Financial Report Template Editor……………………………………………………….7

Financial Report Submission…………………………………………………………...12

Drilldown……………………………………………………………………………….18

Standard Report…………………………………………………………………………24

Repository Management………………………………………………………………...26

Security Workbench……………………………………………………………………..28

Flexfield Value Security………………………………………………………………...29

Users to Value Security…………………………………………………………………30

2

Report Manager

Overview

Report Manager is an integral part of the Oracle Applications e-business suite,

which allows the users to publish and store reports. The document presented here

assumes that the user is aware of the basics of FSG prior to understanding the

functionalities related to FSG in Report Manager.

Report Manager acts as an online secure and convenient location to store and access

point-in-time reports published or uploaded to a database. This produces publishing

quality reports complete with the company logo (or any other image) and own style

formatting. Thus it allows users to have a personalized look and feel on their reports. The

reports generated through Report Manager do not have the plain text look as in case of

those generated from the standard applications.

Users can access these reports from the Oracle Self Service Web Applications using a

browser supported by Oracle Applications, such as the Internet Explorer. This does not

require users to login into the forms, hence no separate software such as the jinitiator

needs to be downloaded and installed on the PCs from which users want to access Report

Manager.

It also allows you to select from a variety of security rules, which can be used to restrict

user access to the published content.

Users can submit FSGs or standard reports available from the applications. Please note

that you cannot use Report Manager to define or modify reports as of now. You can only

use it for submitting, publishing and accessing reports.

Report Types

The following four types of reports can be submitted and published using Report

Manager:

1. Single Report: Report for a specific time period. Say for example you can have

the Company Balance Sheet for the period Jun-2008.

2. Single Report Over Time: One report published for multiple time periods. For

example you publish the Company Balance Sheet for all the periods in your

financial year.

3. Expanded Report: A single report published based on the organizational structure

or hierarchy. For instance you can publish the Company Balance Sheet on a

departmental basis or based on the cost center as per your requirement.

3

4. Expanded Report Over Time: An expanded report available for different time

periods. For example you can have the Company Balance Sheet on a departmental

basis for all the periods in your financial year.

Both Standard Report and FSGs can be submitted using Report Manager.

Availability

Report Manager is available from Release 11i (Applications version 11.5.2) onwards.

The latest version for 11i is 11.5.10 with ATG RUP 5 & 6.

For Release 11i, the FRM patch set needs to be applied. The latest patch set is FRM.H

delivered through Patch 4206794. This needs to be applied over and above the FRM.G

delivered through Patch 3761838.

FRM.G is not optional and both these patches need to be applied and that too in the

alphabetic sequence.

From Release 12, Report Manager comes pre-installed with the Oracle Applications

Auto-Install and you need to enable this from the License manager from your Oracle

Applications Manager. There are no pre-requisite patch sets to be applied. The latest

patch set for R12 is FRM.A for RUP 5.

Dependencies

This uses the Oracle Applications Self Services Web Applications. This enables all users

to access Report Manager from a browser based platform, using html instead of the

standard forms.

It also requires the XML Publisher or the XDO Engine. Using the XML Publisher

ensures publishing quality report output complete with company logo and style

formatting as per user requirements.

Finally the FSGs should have been defined in the Applications. For standard reports, they

should be assigned to Request Group, which is assigned to the Report Manager

responsibility. Any report not included in the Request Group attached to the Report

Manager menu will not be available.

4

Report Manager Set Up

Report Manager comes installed with some pre-defined menus. In order to use all the

functionalities, users need to define/assign a number of other menus.

Menu Definition

Define the menu to be used for Report Manager.

Menu: Report Manager Super User

User Menu Name: Select a user defined menu name.

Menu Type: Standard

Add the following Functions to the menu:

1. Financial Report Template Editor

2. Financial Report Submission

3. Standard Report Submission

4. Repository Management

5. FSG Drilldown Launch Page

6. FSG Drilldown: Select Content Set Rows

7. FSG Drilldown: Effective Range Selection Page

8. FSG Drilldown: Balance Inquiry Page

9. Account Analysis and Drilldown

10. Report Set Publish

11. Report Set Publishing Options

12. Request Set Publish

13. Request Set Publishing Options

14. Security Workbench

5

Navigation: System Administrator Responsibility > Application > Menu.

6

Responsibility Definition

Define a responsibility for Report Manager Super User

1. This should have the Data Group as Standard.

2. In the Available From field check the radio button for “Oracle Self Services Web

Applications”.

3. Menu name should be the one that was defined in the last step on Menu

Definition.

4. The request group should be GL Concurrent Program Group for the application

General Ledger. This is to ensure that the reports available to the General Ledger

responsibility are also available through Report Manager.

Navigation: System Administrator > Security > Responsibility.

7

Usability

Following are the various functions that can be accessed from Report Manager Super

User Responsibility. Each of these items is explained in detail.

Financial Report Template Editor

Financial Report Submission

Drilldown capabilities on FSGs

Standard Report Submission

Repository Management

Security Workbench

Financial Report Template Editor

A template is the report format that is used by the report manager to publish the reports.

All the templates are report specific and templates need to be defined for each and every

report the user has. A template defined for one report will not work for another report

unless that has also been defined using this functionality.

There is, however, one basic inbuilt pre-seeded template called ‘Generic FSG Template’

which can be used with any FSG, irrespective of the number of rows and columns it has.

However, no modifications can be made to this template since this is a seeded template.

A template is customized by the user and then uploaded to the server to get it applied for

the FSG publishing. Following changes can be made to a generated template:

•Add and remove report elements

•Change location of report elements on the page

•Modify row and column sizes

•Use standard Excel formatting such as making bold or italics

Templates are stored in XSL-FO format and stored in XML Publisher's Template

Manager.

8

Navigation: Financial Report Template Editor > Select Report name, language and

editor > Create > Modify Template as per requirements > Upload

The above shows the Financial Template Editor selection page.

Shown below is the page that will be displayed when system is creating the excel

template.

9

The screenshot shown below shows the Excel Template that has been created by the

editor for you to modify and upload.

You can modify the above template as per your requirements. You can format this with

bold headings, colour, picture or company image etc.

The edited template may look something like this:

10

The upload process can be submitted by clicking on Oracle Menu from the standard

toolbar. Upon clicking on the upload sub menu, a pop up will appear asking user to

provide a name for the template and other upload parameters. As in the next screenshot

you will get two check boxes.

The first one is for overwriting any existing templates with the same name. If you check

this option then the upload process will overwrite any existing template with the same

name.

The second check box is for enabling drilldown for this template. In case you want to

drilldown from your FSG, you need to have a drill-enabled template. We will discuss this

in a subsequent topic.

Check both the abovesaid boxes as per your requirements and click on “Upload” to

upload to server.

11

In case of any errors during the upload process, the system will show the error message

and you need to troubleshoot accordingly.

The above message shows that the template has been successfully uploaded to the server.

12

Financial Report Submission

This is the menu to submit the FSGs defined in your applications.

You need to mention the report submission parameters including the template you want

to use to publish the FSG, and then submit the report. The default template will be the

one, which was used for this in the last submission for this report. In case you need to use

a template different than the one used in the last run, you need to click on the LOV for

the templates and select the appropriate one.

The report output can be viewed through the “Report Viewer” where the user can select

between HTML, Excel and Pdf output types. Currently these are the supported output

formats. The default output type is html.

You can select for any period from the LOV for time frame. The LOV will have values of

all the periods for which this report was run. If the report has been run for only one

period, then there will be no LOV and only a single period value will be reflected. The

LOV will have the first period for which this report was run as the default period in the

viewer, for which the report will be displayed. User needs to select the exact period from

the LOV for which the report is needed.

In case the report was submitted with a content set, either defined and attached to the

report or selected during runtime, the report viewer will show the LOV for selecting the

content set-value for which you want to see the report, in the viewer. The expansion

value will be as per the content set definition.

Note: Currently you can run reports with content sets only in the sequentially processing

mode. XML Publisher does not support the parallel type processing with content sets and

hence this is not supported currently from Report Manager.

13

Screenshot is showing the Submission parameters page.

As you can see, we have mentioned the report name, the content set, the period, currency

and the ledger. Selecting a ledger is available only for Release 12 users and not relevant

for release 11i.

You can also select the override segment in the additional parameters field.

Users can also schedule the FSG to run at a pre-scheduled time or instantly. The default

value is ‘Now’ i.e. instantly.

14

The next screenshot shows the publishing parameters you need to mention, to publish

your FSG.

We have selected the template that we created in the last topic.

The following screen shows the storage location in the repository. The report will be

stored in the location that you specify. In the future you can retrieve the report from this

location in your repository.

15

The next screenshot shows the presentation page. You need to mention here if you want

to create a shortcut menu to be placed on your main navigation page.

After you have selected all the parameters you can review the parameters from the

Review page and in case you want to make any changes, you can go back to the

appropriate page and make the changes and come back to this page.

16

Once reviewing is done, you can submit the report and click on monitor requests. This

will take you to the Request Center from where you can see the report processing status

and also get the output.

This is the screenshot of the Request Center that you can see. When submitting any report

from Report Manager, there will be two requests that will be submitted.

You can see that there are two requests shown below. One is the “Testing Drilldown

(Financial Statement Generator)” and the other one is “Testing Drilldown (Publish and

Presentation Program)”.

The first request is for generating the XML tags that will be processed by the second

request to publish the report output in a legible format.

Navigation: Financial Report Submission > Select submission parameters > Select

template and other parameters > Select Repository location > Select Presentation for

creating a menu item > Submit FSG > Monitor request > View report

17

This is the output we get when we click on the Publish and Presentation Program output.

In the above output we can see the different LOVs that are available.

This report was run for a number of periods and hence we can see the LOV for the

timeframe. The current period is Oct-05.

We can also see the expansion value LOV that allows us to select the exact content set

value for which we want to see the report output. Selecting a value from the LOV will

display the output for that content set expansion value.

Finally the LOV for output type shows the default type of html. We can select between

HTML, PDF and Excel.

18

Drilldown

This allows the user to drill into report values using the Account Analysis and Drilldown

feature once the FSG output is generated. This is exactly the same as available from the

applications using the Account Inquiry form.

If drilldown from the report is required, the template should be drill-enabled while

uploading to the server. This has already been shown on in this Whitepaper on the page

for Financial Template Editor Upload.

For R 11i drilldown can be performed only if FRM.H has been applied. Over and above

this, you will have to apply Patch 5377946 in 11i for getting the drilldown functionality

on the FSG reports.

Performing an FSG Drilldown:

1] Your FSG HTML report output will show links for each amount on the report. If the

source of the amount is an account assignment, you will be able to drill further using

GL's Account Analysis and Drilldown feature to review more details about your report

amount. Drilldown does not apply to calculated amounts.

2] For reports generated with a Content Set using the Page Expand action, you will be

able to display the report page for a specific expansion value by selecting from the values

dropdown list. If the selected expansion value is a parent value, you will be prompted

upon drilldown on a report amount to select which of the selected parent's child value

you wish to view for the drill.

3] If the selected amount consists of multiple account assignment ranges, you will be

presented an Effective Ranges page so you can choose which specific range you are

interested in. An Effective Ranges breadcrumb link will be present in the drilldown page

to allow you to switch to a different account assignment range.

4] The Search criteria recap the specification for the report amount, including the account

range, the period range, the balance type, the currency type, the currency, among others.

Click the Go button to run the query and retrieve the account balances information for the

report amount.

5] From the account balance, you can further drill into the journals, and subledger details

where this is applicable.

19

6] You can also take advantage of the Export functionality in Account Analysis and

Drilldown to export the drilldown information to Excel where you can easily perform

additional computations and analysis.

From our Template Editor function this is what we had uploaded to the server. You can

see that we had enabled drill for this template.

20

This is the report output that we got. If you take the mouse pointer to the report value

(which appears with an underline), the pointer will change to the hand symbol and

clicking on it will take you to the drilldown page, which will open in a separate browser

window.

21

You can see that the period and account range is already selected since the drilldown is

being done for this period and range from the FSG.

22

Clicking on the column value will further take you to the detail balances page like shown

below.

You can see the various amounts that make up the total amount in the report. Clicking on

any of the debit or credit amounts will take you to the forms. In case a forms session has

not been started, it will ask you for the responsibility you want to use for drilling to the

appropriate sub-ledger. Upon selecting the correct sub-ledger, this will take you to the

sub-ledger transaction form, from which the balance emanated.

23

You will get the forms from the Applications like on the next screenshot.

24

Standard Reports

Standard Oracle reports available to the concerned responsibility can also be submitted

from Report Manager. Each Standard Report that will be published using Report

Manager will need to be configured to have an output as XML.

Each Standard Report that will be published using Report Manager will also need to be

registered as a Data Definition in XML Publisher’s Template Manager. You need to

check how to define a new template from the XML Publisher responsibility.

Thus requirement to define a template remains the same for both FSGs and standard

reports.

Currently, there is a known issue with the special and pair validation types. For reports

with these two validation types a workaround is suggested in Metalink Note.378338.1.

The above screenshot shows a standard report being submitted. The next screenshot

shows the template that has been defined from the XML Publisher responsibility, which

is being used to submit the standard report in the last screenshot.

The submission steps are the same as in the case of FSG.

25

Following is the standard report output you will get with the template. This is just a

sample output and the exact output format may differ as per the template design.

Navigation: Standard Report Submission > Select submission parameters > Select the

template and other publishing options > Submit the report > View report.

26

Repository Management

All the reports generated from report manager are stored in the Reports Repository which

is available through this menu. Thus, this serves primarily as a reports warehouse.

The reports are stored directly in the database. In FRM.G and above, the reports are

stored in table FRM_REPOSITORY_LOBS.

You can define a report folder in the repository for storing your reports. The repository

location is mentioned when submitting the report itself or you can do so from Repository

management later.

Shown below is a screenshot of the Repository Management.

You will see two buttons at the top left hand side of the page: Archive and Delete.

These are used for archiving and deleting the reports once their immediate requirement is

over.

You can select any report from the ones available on the viewer and then click on archive

to archive the report. In this case, you can go to ‘View Archives’ to view the reports that

have been archived. The users cannot view reports marked as archived. If you want, you

can de-archive the existing archived reports so that they are once again available to the

users.

Navigation: Repository Management > Select report to be archived/deleted > Select the

appropriate option to archive/delete.

27

You can also mark reports for deletion. Once a report is marked for deletion, this is no

longer user viewable and is deleted from the database once the Repository Maintenance

program is run. This is submitted from the option of “Maintain Repository” shown in the

next screenshot.

These are available at the top right hand of the Repository Management page.

Note: Please ensure before running the Repository Maintenance that the following

patches have been applied on the instance.

Patch 6884665 if on R 11i

Patch 6884280 if on R 12

28

Security Workbench

Report Manager provides security feature, which can be used to secure the data available

for viewing by the Users. Users can choose from the following four security models to

control content of reports published to the database:

• None: Individual security (responsibility) within Oracle Applications is extended

to Report Manager. Individual user access to reports is determined by their

assigned responsibility

• Flexfield Value Security: Standard applications flexfield value security is

attached to a responsibility and applied to the user who is publishing and viewing

financial reports.

• User to Value Security: Security can be defined in Oracle Report Manager to

control access to secured financial reports.

• PL/SQL Based Security: Allows users to create and apply their own (Custom)

security suited to their own needs to Oracle Report Manager.

29

Flexfield Value Security

This extends Oracle Applications flexfield value security to FSGs that are published and

viewed through report manager. You can publish and view reports only by value sets to

which you have access.

Flexfield security must be defined in the applications and attached to the responsibility

you are using and to the folder to which you are publishing your reports.

The pre-requisites for this are:

•The report is a financial report (FSG).

•The report is submitted with a content set.

•Exactly one segment value in the content set has a display type of PE

(Page/Expand).

•Choose the security in the report submission parameter

An illustration of how this works has been shown below.

For the illustration, we have already defined the security rules in the applications and

attached this to the user who is trying to access the report.

The security rule has been defined for the department segment. This is the same segment

for which the content set has been defined. We have the security rule for the department

values from 700 to 799, thus restricting the user from accessing the information for these

departments.

Since the published report has been restricted by a department value set the user can see

the data for all departments except those between 700 and 799.

30

The following screenshot shows the error the user gets when trying to see the report for

the departments to which access is restricted. For any other department to which he has

access, he can view the report.

Users to Value Security

User to Value security is applied to FSGs that use a content set or standard reports that

contain a valid expansion value. This allows you to define a security model for Oracle

Report Manager based on segment values for financial reports published into the

database. When you access Oracle Report Manager, you can view reports based on a

segment value, and framed by a security model set for you.

To create this model you need to select participating valuesets and then assign user

privileges to values within the valuesets.

Navigation: Security Workbench > Add Value Sets > Query for the required

participating value sets > Add value set.

31

Once the value set has been added, you need to assign users to value or values to user.

In case you have many users to be assigned to a specific value, you can use users to

value. Else if you have many values to be assigned to a user, use values to user.

Navigation: Security Workbench > Add Value Sets > Select the required Value Set and

add it.

Next, we need to assign certain values to a specific user.

32

Navigation: Security Workbench > Values to User > Select User name > Add Values >

Select Values to be assigned.

In the above screenshot we can see that the user TESTUSER has been assigned viewer

privileges to the values 100, 110, 120, 130. This means that this user can view the report

output for these values only.

While submitting the report you need to mention the security type that you want to apply

to this report. This is how you select the exact security models you want to submit your

report with during the report submission.

33

The other submission options remain the same and after you get the report output, if you

try to select one of the restricted values in the expansion value LOV, you will get an error

as shown below.

The TESTUSER has not been granted access to the value 000 and so when the

TESTUSER tries to view this report for the restricted value, he gets the error.

Navigation: Financial Report Submission > Provide submission parameters > Select

the Security Model to be applied > Submit FSG > View report > Security is enforced.

When the TESTUSER selects the value 100, to which he has been granted access, he will

get the report output as shown below.

Note: The report output is devoid of values as there are no corresponding amounts in the

accounts.

34

You can check the security set that has been assigned to a user using the Security

Workbench.

Navigation: Security Workbench > Query for any of the parameters.

35

References:

1. Oracle Report Manager- User Guide.

2. Note 726958.1 List of Patches Released in Report Manager for Releases 11i and 12.

3. Note 378338.1 About Oracle Report Manager Minipack 11i.H (FRM.H).

36

White Paper Title: Overview of Report Manager. [July] 2008 Author: Arnab Chatterjee, ISC. Contributing Authors: Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 www.oracle.com Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Various Product and service names referenced herein may be trademarks of Oracle Corporation. All other product and service names mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright © 2001 Oracle Corporation All rights reserved.