Thursday, March 22, 2012

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!!



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