What Is Oracle Reports?
Oracle Reports is Oracle's enterprise-reporting tool used by large corporations and information systems departments to produce boardroom-quality reports on any type of data. Oracle Reports Service provides a stable, high-performance environment to create and distribute those reports to their users via a virtually endless list of distribution channels.

The flexible layout models allow you to create optimized reports for both paginated output, such as printing, as well as Web-oriented output. Based on standards, the reporting environment can be extended to solve a customer's exact needs.

Oracle Reports consists of two components - Reports Builder and Reports Services. You can use Reports Builder to connect to any data source (for example, any relational database, text files, XML, or OLAP) and use its WYSIWYG reports editor, wizards, and templates to design the report based on your data.

Reports Services allows you to generate the report output in any format once your report is designed. For example, you can generate reports in PDF, RTF, XML, HTML, Excel, and other formats. You can send the report output to any destination, such as a file system, e-mail, printer, or FTP server.

Publishing Information on the Web
Oracle Reports can dynamically display information via a Web browser in two ways. You can use your page based paper-layout to create the following industry standard formats: Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), HTML (3.2), HTML Cascading Style Sheets (HTML 4.01), and XML. The other option is to create a "real" Web page by using the JSP-based Web source. The latter method's advantage is that you can inject dynamic Reports content into an existing Web page. In this mode, Reports no longer own the page and you can use any HTML page you get from a Web designer. Therefore, the result will exactly match the look-and-feel of your Web site.

Different Oracle Reports Styles
Reports Builder uses a very flexible and powerful frame-based layout. You can use the layout editor to create virtually any report style that you want. You can also create reports templates, and use these templates to create your reports.

Report Wizard helps you to quickly create reports with one of its commonly used report styles (such as tabular, matrix, group, and so on).

Oracle Reports also gives you the flexibility to freely define your report layout by placing the fields anywhere on your page, as well as by combining it with multiple blocks in common styles in a single report.

Embedding Graphs
Through the use of the Graph Wizard, you can easily create and embed a graph into your report with a simple point-and-click style interface. You can re-enter the wizard after finishing the report to modify the settings. You can also specify graph customization settings in Graph XML that is part of the report definition.

Java Interface for Communicating with Reports Server
Oracle Reports can be exposed as a Web service. This functionality enables any application developer to include Oracle Reports in their application, especially Java applications. You can perform several tasks using the Oracle Reports Web service, such as submitting a job, obtaining the status of a job, or canceling a job.

You can also write your business logic in Java classes, and use the classes in Oracle Reports via the Java Importer functionality. Additionally, Oracle Reports has a wealth of documented Java APIs that you can use to extend its functionality.

XML Support in Reports
Oracle Reports supports XML as a data source (including XML Schema support). In addition, Oracle Reports provides you with an option to describe an entire report definition in XML. Generating report output to XML format is a popular feature used to send report output to other applications that understand XML format. Additionally, it is possible to specify layout customizations in XML format and apply those customizations to the report at run-time.

Availability

Report Services is available in Oracle Application Server. Reports Builder is available in Oracle Developer Suite.

If you have Oracle BITools installed, to start Reports Builder, click Start > Programs > Oracle Business Intellingence Tools - OracleBI Tools Home > Reports Developer >Reports Builder.