I have a page with an interactive report. If I do a 'Control Break' and have an aggregate in place, is there a way I can export the results to Excel, exactly the way it appears on the page?
When I 'Download' the report, it appears as the third screen shot, which is not separated.
Interactive Report Results:
How I would like to export the data to Excel:
The format that is currently exported:
The download to excel is always in CSV format. The file extension is not .xlsxbut .CSV. So, i'd say no.
It's tough too. Even if you were to create a custom export to excel you'd have to extract the current query of the report (which is something that has finally been made easier in 4.2, but is possible in 4.0/1 with 3rd party packages). Then you'd also have to account for the control break(s) you applied, since those are not reflected in the IR query (even with APEX_IR).
I've dabbled with generating an xlsx file and made a blogpost/sample application on that if you'd like to see what it encompasses. Be aware that this is taking 'custom solution' to the extreme though (at least, in my opinion).
http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=10063
you could create the report in BI Publisher in Oracle, then through APEX, you can call the report with parameters.
Actually APEX Office Print (AOP) supports exporting for Interactive Report and Interactive Grid (and others) to Excel, exactly as you see on the screen (so including breaks, group by etc)
Related
In COGNOS is there a way to get the definitions (filters, selected fields) from a number of reports in a folder?
I've inherited around 500 reports defined in a folder and they all need to be checked and fixed as they have business errors (not technical errors). If it was possible to get all their definitions in a single extract that would save an enormous amount of time having to click multiple times to get that information from each report one by one.
In ACCESS this can be done with VBA (for query definitions), but I'm not sure if there is a scripting language that can be used with COGNOS to achieve a similar result.
It sounds like you may want to "validate" each of these 500 reports (effectively equivalent to pressing the "validate" button on each individual report if it was open in the authoring studio).
Validation will ensure that a report specification XML is still syntactically correct, references a package which is still present the content store, references only query items from that package which still exist, generates valid SQL vs. the underlying datasource, etc.
If that's what you're looking for, an easy way to do batch validation for all 500 reports would be to use MotioPI (its a free admin tool for Cognos). Here's a short article which walks you through the process:
http://info.motio.com/Blog/bid/70357/Batch-Validation-of-Cognos-Reports
If you're wanting to retrieve the actual report specification (XML) for each of these 500 objects, then you'd need to write a program which utilizes the Cognos SDK to retrieve the specification XML from each of the 500 report objects. After that, you'd need to add logic which examines each of these 500 XML documents, looking for whatever it is you're looking for.
We solved this by exporting the XML of the reports using a SQL query on the content store.
The output is processed with a Python script to convert XML to table layout in CSV format.
This CSV-file can easely be imported in Excel.
You might want to process the reports XML directly in a SQL query with the xmltable function. In our situation this turned out to be a heavy proces we don't want to burden the content store database with. For a small set of reports this is working fine though.
With newly released Webi there's no way to manipulate reports with VBA like it was in DESKI era.
I'd like to know if there's a way for me to click a button with parameters in Excel sheet and get a report from the server?
I've been thinking of using the RESTful Web-services but it seems that there is a performance problem.
I also considered using a JAVA app in the middle using the SDK but it's not really satisfying as I add one layer.
Do you know if there's an other way to download a Webi report from and to Excel?
For this type of requirement, you'd normally use the OpenDocument feature. There is one thing that it won't do however, at least not for Webi documents, and that is deliver the output in Excel format (HTML and PDF are the two possible formats for Webi). In all fairness, the export to Excel option is only about two or three clicks away, but I can understand that this wouldn't be an ideal solution.
Another option is the Java SDK, which I would not recommend, as the ReBEAN SDK (the part of the Java SDK you need to interface with Webi documents) is deprecated and replaced by the REST SDK.
The REST SDK would be the way to go if the OpenDocument feature is not sufficient. Keep in mind that this would involve quite a few steps, each time sending a command to the WACS server and then decoding the answer. The steps would be:
Authenticate and get a logon token
Refresh the document (if necessary pass prompt values)
Export the document to Excel
Close the document
The REST interface is only supported on the WACS server, which should run on your BI4 server (unless you have a customised landscape). If it's slow, I would suggest looking into the root cause of this performance issue, instead of discarding the SDK altogether.
If you're going to use the REST interface, I would recommend opting for JSON to communicate through REST instead of XML. It's easier to read and parse.
A last option, which I wouldn't recommend, is LiveOffice. This is a separate product which allows you to embed contents from Webi documents into Office documents (most notably Excel). LiveOffice has always had its share of problems and has not received much love from SAP regarding much needed updates.
One final thought: the report will never appear in the same sheet, at least not without an additional amount of coding. Whatever SDK you end up choosing, you will always end up with an Excel file. If you want to show the results in the Excel file you started from, you'll need to code the steps to open the generated file, grab the contents and then copy those to your worksheet.
Is there any way to dictate the format of a Crystal Report via the registry? I have come across various registry entries, such as:
HKLM\Software\Business Objects\Suite 11.5\Crystal Reports\Export\Excel
HKCU\Software\Business Objects\Suite 11.5\Crystal Reports Designer Component\Export\Excel
Which contain a number of keys, like MailDestDLL, ExportDirectory, etc.
What I cannot find is any documentation which would contain an entry for me to, for example, write ExcelDataOnly underneath Export, which would force the default export format to be Excel (Date Only). Currently, it is formatted Excel. I realize I can simply select the proper format from within Crystal, but these are automated, so we don't have the option for doing that. I'd like to control as much as possible through the registry as it pertains to the export of reports.
We use a product called VisualCUT that makes it easy to schedule and automate the export, printing, and bursting of reports.
Why would you need to rewrite the reports ?
I am using R-Tag and you can schedule and set the export type, for example excel, pdf, excel data only etc. If you don't have a budget for new software you can use R-Tag Community edition (http://www.r-tag.com/Pages/CommunityEdition.aspx), which is free and still coming with a nice scheduler and plenty of features.
I'm looking to download a list of issues from our JIRA issue list, to process further in VBA and generate a report from the issue list. I want this process to be automated from start to end so e.g. I run a java or VB or C# program, which does a search and download from JIRA (somehow) then runs a VBA program to extract and format the issues into a report. Is there anyway this can be done? I'm using JIRA 3.13.
I've looked at the JIRA and Atlassian plugins but don't quite understand how they work. Aren't plugins meant to be deployed into the JIRA instance. I don't see how plugins can achieve what i want to do.
You'll likely want to use the JIRA SOAP web service via a SOAP client in your program. This can call the getIssuesFromFilter method to return the results of a filter. Then generate the csv file for Excel to import or whatever you want.
Better Excel Plugin was exactly designed for these type of usage.
You can export your issues to a worksheet, then instruct the XLS template to process them using the Excel tools, like formulas and functions, charts, pivot tables and pivot charts, to produce full blown reports. It is fully automatic and the report can be generated by a single click.
If you look for automation, like generating and emailing the report periodically, or generating and saving the report when an issue event occurs, the companion add-on Excel Automation Plugin is super useful.
Here is a sample report to give you an idea about the capabilities:
Our product has the requirement of exporting its native format (essentially an XML file) to Excel for viewing/editing. However, what this entails is having a dependency on Excel (or Office) itself for our product build - something that we do not want.
What we have done is export the data from our native format to a csv file which can be opened in Excel. If user selects an option to open the generated report as well, we (try to) launch Excel application to open it (ofcourse it requires Excel to be already present on the client system).
The data for most part is flat list of records.
Is there a better format (or even a better way) to handle this requirement? This is a common requirement for many products - how do you handle this?
Excel versions, both 2007 and several previous, have native XML formats. 2007, obviously, is XML by default, and earlier versions have the ability to save as XML. This SO question deals with the issue. I'd guess a little inspection would give an idea of what's required. I don't know if a XSD/DTD exists for older versions, but a little creative Googling might yield something.
As other people pointed out, it is reasonably easy to generate Excel XML files. You can do this in multiple ways. For example:
By creating a template Excel XML document, and then using XML DOM to stuff your data into the template, or
Converting the template Excel XML into an XSLT, and then simply passing your proprietary XML as input to XSLT.
I'm using ExcelPackage to create spreadsheets in one of my side projects. Works pretty good, but (at least the version I'm using) its a bit limited when it comes to styling and calculations.
ExcelPackage lets you create OOXML docs (.xslx files) that are natively compat with 2k7, but you can download a plugin for previous versions of Office from MS.
We export our data either using Excel objects (COM based code) on client side or CSV file (usually on server side, but can be used on client side too). And we allow copy data from grids in simple html format, what can be pasted into Excel without problems.
For one customer we even had to export data [from sql stored procedure] into csv-like tab-separated format, but named file like xxxxx.xls - this way excel opened that file in more correct way than csv file. Ugly hack, but worked well.
CSV is most compatible format (no dependencies on external applications or libraries), but customers don't like it. Maybe we need to incorporate some XLS export code, this way all users will be happy :)
If .csv isn't formatted enough, you could create a template in Excel, and use a little bit of VBA code to import the CSV and format it appropriately. This way your app is only concerned with generating the .CSV, and will use the same .XLS for each export.
If you're careful, you should be able to get this to work with most versions of Excel seamlessly.
With Perl there are several modules that can be used to produce .xlsx files without requiring an Office installation. Among those :
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::Writer::XLSX is the most well-known, with support for many Excel features like colors, formatting, etc.
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::ValueWriter::XLSX (I'm actually the author) has less features but is optimized for fast writing of large amounts of data
If you are working in Java, Checkout the POI project from APACHE.
http://poi.apache.org/
Simple, nice, complete, powerful.
We started with Office on the server, but that's not very nice. We had to kill processes that hung, and had quite a bit of a performance dip. We thought about putting it on a different machine, but didn't bother after trying and using Aspose (commercial). We don't have a very large number of simultaneous users, but complex documents. Simple ones can be handled easier with csv.
I've used FlexCel Studio for a couple of projects now. It's very functional and fast. 100% managed code, no dependencies. Sounds like you'd use the "Reports" feature which allows you to define an empty report template in Excel, then pass datatable and volia, it's populated with your data.
TMS Software
We use a combination of OleDB and Interop. We found that Interop was much faster and used less memory, but it's a pain for compatibility issues, especially when using different language installs of Office.
OleDb has the advantage that you don't require Excel to be installed on the client machine. Both Interop and OleDb support multiple sheets (tables) per workbook which you cannot do with csv.
If you're using C# or VB.Net, and your data is in a a DataSet, DataTable or List<>, then you can use my free "Export to Excel" class.
It uses the free Microsoft OpenXML libraries (so you don't need to have Excel on your server), and lets you export your data into a "real" .xlsx file with just one line of code, eg:
DataSet ds = CreateSampleData();
CreateExcelFile.CreateExcelDocument(ds, "C:\\Sample.xlsx");
All source code is provided on the following page along with a demo project, completely free of charge (and popups !)
http://mikesknowledgebase.com/pages/CSharp/ExportToExcel.htm
Hope this helps !