HTML content in BIP Report

This is war-cry for all BIP gladiators.

Recently while working with BIP reports we hit a road block in displaying HTML content. We need to display a control in BIP report with proper HTML formatting but however when report is rendered it displays HTML tag as is without formatting. The data input is RTCEmbedded control in siebel which saves data encapsulated in HTML tags but instead of transformation those tags are displayed in BIP report as normal text. We tried with integration approach as well as SQL query based reporting architecture but of no luck.

From Tim's blog we got an idea of XSLFO format but it is of not much help as while retrieving the content from database BIP engine process data as & l t; instead of proper HTML < or > tags i.e. they are not escaped. I have already tried below options to fail.

•  Escaping <,> to its ascii equivalent in sql
•  Using clob/Nclob column to store data

As a stop gap solution we are currently chopping HTML tags from the data using XSL and displaying content in a plain format. Any jail break on this trivial issue is most welcome. 

Happy Reporting!!

RTCEmbedded Control

"When the solution is simple, God is answering"- Albert Einstein

Recently we were asked to implement a embedded text editor in a control which could facilitate user for text formatting including features such as bold, italic,font, color etc.  The first reaction was can-we-do-it types with nothing popping in mind (Yeah, thought of Email Templates view never occurred ).But with some help of support web solution turned out to be much much simpler.

We can achieve this by using control of type "RTCEmbedded". This control type provides an embedded text editor which supports below html tag:

• Bold < STRONG>
• italic <EM>
• Underline <U>
• Ordered list <OL>
• List items <LI>
• <P>
• <FONT>
• <BLOCKQUOTE >

However there are certain caveats while using this type:
1 - Control doesn't turn out grey in case of read only conditions.
2 - Throws an error when reaching field length and clears out everything forcing user to renter everything.
3 - It is not currently possible to paste text and graphics (such as graph or image) within such controls.
4 - We can't use this column directly in SQL based reporting purpose without appropriate parsing.

Happy Crunching!!