Oracle delivers an assortment of seeded report producing programs with Oracle
Applications. These reports are generated by means of different programs and
utilities such as SQL*Plus scripts, Oracle Reports, C programs, PL/SQL stored
procedures, and so on. The majority of all reports delivered with Oracle
Applications have been developed with Oracle Reports.
Oracle Reports, a component of Oracle Developer 2000, is installed and
integrated with Oracle Applications. A report output file is generated when a
binary Report Definition Files (RDF) is processed by the Oracle Reports runtime
executable R25RUN. The executables, libraries, and configuration files can be
found under the Oracle_Home directory (~/bin and ~/reports25). However, report
definition files (RDF's) are typically found under the Applications product top
directories (~/srw for release 10.7 or ~/reports for release 11).
Each RDF is registered with Oracle Applications and can be submitted for
execution through an application form. Report scheduling and printing is
performed via the services of the Concurrent Processing Server; an integral
component of Oracle Applications. The Concurrent Processing Server, also known
as the Concurrent Manager (CCM), facilitates job scheduling, report printing,
job status, and/or history tracking.
Oracle Reports provides an extensive environment for developing and processing
bit-mapped(Postscript) reports or character-mode (ASCII Text) reports. In
addition, either Postscript or character reports can be run on a bit-mapped
platform environment like Windows, or on a character platform environment like
Unix. Although the greater number of Oracle Reports used in Applications have
been designed as character-mode reports, in Oracle Applications Release 11 the
output of the reports can be transformed to other supported formats: HTML, Text,
PDF, and Postscript. Each format type meets a certain technological need or
criteria.
