1. Introduction

OracleAS Reports Services is an enterprise reporting service for producing high quality production reports that dynamically retrieve, format, and distribute any data, in any format, anywhere.

The default engine provided with OracleAS Reports Services (oracle.reports.engine.EngineImpl) includes components for running SQL-based and pluggable data source-based reports. It fetches requested data from the data source, formats the report, sends the output to cache, and notifies the Reports Server that the job is complete.

It is also possible to plug in your own engines into the Reports Server. Pluggable Engines are custom engines that use Java APIs to pass jobs to the Reports Server, as well as leverage the server's other features, such as scheduling, distribution, notification, and caching. OracleAS Reports Services provides an out-of-the-box pluggable engine called the URL engine. The URL engine enables you to distribute content from any publicly available URL to such destinations such as e-mail, OracleAS Portal, and WebDav. Since Reports Server’s destinations are pluggable, you can also add your own custom destinations for the URL content.

Furthermore, if you use the URL engine in conjunction with Reports Server’s event-based APIs, database events can trigger the content distribution. For example, suppose you have created a JSP report for high fidelity Web publishing of data stored in a table containing employee expense data. You could then use the URL engine and the event-based API to e-mail that JSP whenever the expense application stores new or updated employee expense data in the table.

This tutorial will show you how to write your own engine using the URL engine as an example.

At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to:

• Implement an Engine class with Oracle Reports
• Register your custom Engine with Oracle Reports
• Use the custom Engine with Oracle Reports

Note that the URL Engine is available out-of-the-box with Oracle Reports 9i and 10g.