Oracle Reports 10g Development Environment

Oracle Reports 10 g Development Environment

All of these features would be irrelevant if the process for developing reports was arduous for developers. Oracle Reports 10 g provides a WYSIWYG editor (WYSIWYG stands for what you see is what you get) and tools to preview your work for both paper and web-based layouts and a JavaServer Pages (JSP) engine. The developer has the choice of using layout and data wizards to generate much of the code necessary for a finished report, or to bypass these wizards entirely, giving the developer total control of all report aspects. Even if the wizards are used, the developer still has the ability to enhance the code generated by the wizards. The wizards are what is termed reentrant, meaning that even after manual modifications to the reports have been made by the developer, the wizards can be run again with fields in the wizards populated with the changes (and vice versa).

There are many advanced features of Oracle Reports 10 g . Some of these include:

• A Java import program to generate wrapper PL/SQL packages for Java classes. (This is new to Reports, but PL2Java has been around for some time.)

• Oracle JDeveloper 10 g integration for development and debugging of Reports JSPs.

• Oracle Software Configuration Management (SCM) integration for source control.

Tip  

These advanced features are beyond the scope of this book. For more information, see the online Reports documentation at http://docs.oracle.com or http://tahiti.oracle.com.