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
 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.

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 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.

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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

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Navigation: System Administrator Responsibility > Application > Menu.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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White Paper Title: Overview of Report Manager.
[July] 2008
Author: Arnab Chatterjee, ISC.
Contributing Authors:
Oracle Corporation
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Product and service names referenced herein may be trademarks
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Copyright © 2001 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

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