Friday, June 26, 2009

ODTUG2009 - Excel Generation With jXLS Templates

On wednesday morning (08:00 am, really early) I have been presenting at ODTUG Kaleidoskope 2009 in Monterey / California.
The presentation was about "Generating complex Excel reports with APEX and jXLS".

There I first covered your basic choices when it comes to exporting data to Microsoft Excel.
Then I showed how to integrate the open source library jXLS into your APEX applications in order to generate complex Excel sheets using a templating approach.

In more general terms this was a showcase on how to integrate any kind of open source java library into you Oracle applications.

Since I have just loaded java classes into the database and made them available via a pl/sql wrapper, you can use them in any language accessing the Oracle database and calling the interface via pl/sql.

Thus, you can leverage this in applications using Forms, Reports, APEX, PHP, Java, ... You name it.

You can download the presentation slides here.

If anybody is interested, I will put up an example on how to integrate a java framework into your APEX application.

Are you interested?

Regards,
~Dietmar.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

ODTUG2009 - PDF Printing

On Tuesday I have been presenting on ODTUG Kaleidoskope 2009 in Monterey / California. The presentation was about "PDF Printing with APEX - A cost free alternative". There I have shown and detailed the integration of the open source Java reporting engine "JasperReports" into Oracle Application Express for PDF and RTF printing.

For designing the reports you can easily use the graphical design tool "iReport Designer". It will generate the report definition file for you.

The combination of JasperReports and iReport Designer is a real good alternative to the very expensive reporting solution using the BI-Publisher.

You can download the presentation slides from here.

I will make this integration available for free! Right now I have very many things on my list to do, but I will make it available in the future.

If you are interested in such an integration, please drop me a note at: dietmar.aust@opal-consulting.de.

Regards,
~Dietmar.