Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Free Oracle BI Publisher with APEX?

If you login into the INTERNAL workspace in APEX and go to Manage Environment Settings - Instance Settings and go to the Report Printing section, you'll see following screen:


If you then click on the Print Server label, you'll see following text:
"Select the appropriate option:
  • Standard Support - Select this option if you are using the free version of Oracle BI Publisher. This option enables you to use the basic printing functionality, which includes creating report queries and printing report regions using the default templates provided in Application Express.
  • Advanced Support - Select this option if you are using the licensed version of Oracle BI Publisher. This option enables you to take report query results and convert them from XML to RTF format using Oracle BI Publisher. Select this option if you want to upload your own customized RTF or XSL-FO templates for printing reports within Application Express."
I didn't notice that before, but if you read it carefully it says "if you are using the free version of Oracle BI Publisher"!? I didn't know there was a free version? Is Oracle going to announce a free version or is it just a mistake in the documentation/help?

It would be really cool if they announced a free version of a fantastic tool as BIP on OOW ;-)
at

6 comments:

  1. Paulo Vale9/03/2008 12:32 AM

    Nice finding... That would be great news :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9/03/2008 8:05 AM

    Sorry to disappoint you:
    http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=486675&start=0&tstart=0

    Quote:
    No - that is not what we meant to imply (will need to fix that). For Standard Support, you can use BI Publisher (with a valid license) or another, standard XSL-FO processing engine. For Advanced Support, you MUST have BI Publisher (with a valid license).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous9/03/2008 3:59 PM

    See also this article on setting up PDF printing in APEX:

    http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/html/configure_printing.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. Joel R. Kallman9/03/2008 4:28 PM

    Hi Dimitri,

    I'll give you a definitive response - there are no plans to provide a free version of Oracle BI Publisher with Oracle Application Express. This is a bug in the item-level help text which will be fixed in the next release of Oracle Application Express.

    Joel

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dimitri Gielis9/03/2008 4:34 PM

    Thanks Joel. I didn't expect it, but we may always dream ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous9/03/2008 5:34 PM

    I think Oracle should consider this as free one day:

    http://garethroberts.blogspot.com/2008/09/top-7-reasons-for-free-version-of-bi.html

    ReplyDelete