For almost a year already, it has been possible to change the document generation engine of an Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 instance from BI Publisher 10g to Analytics Publisher 12c. Since so far, this isn’t widely used among E-Business Suite customers, let's have a closer look.
Motivation and procedure
The main reasons to do this are both increased stability, long-term support and especially the possibilities to create proper Office 2007+ xlsx files. This produces much smaller files especial for large reports.
The procedure to use Analytics Publisher 12c basically consists of applying some patches and then changing an autoconfig variable from xdo10g to xdo12c. The My Oracle Support (MOS) note "Using Oracle Analytics Publisher with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 (Doc ID 2964098.1)" describes this in full detail.
Issues with templates - Type safety
One issue we found was that some reports could no longer be generated with an XPTY0004 error. The reason for this is also described in 2964098.1: Analytics Publisher is stricter regarding type safety. While with 10g it didn't matter if you declared a variable as string and assigned a number (or vice versa), this now causes issues. While once identified, this is easy to fix, it can be awful to find all the places where the fix has to be applied.
Issues with templates - Matching closing tags
We had some more issues with more strict validations regarding matching opening and closing tags as well. Most of those problems are shown in the "XML Publisher Template Re-Generator" logfile. So, be sure to review that log for any errors or warnings with your custom reports.
Issues with fonts and the € symbol
In some reports we were printing the € symbol into a PDF file. After upgrading to xdo12c, that symbol was missing in all those PDFs. The situation was similar to what is described in "Euro Symbol is Displayed as Question Mark '?' in XML Publisher Report (Doc ID 387698.1)". However, in our 12.2.12 instance those Albany Fonts were available. And they were picked up when using xdo10g.
Setting the BI Publisher into debug mode as described in 286962.1 - "How to Obtain Debug Information for XML Publisher Version 5.6?" brought us to find this undocumented bug: Analytics Publisher 12c is relying on GoNotoCurrent*.ttf fonts that are not available in 12.2.12.
You can either wait for Oracle to fix that bug or apply the 12.2.14 patch or - if that is a bit of an overkill - just extract the GoNotoCurrent fonts from the 12.2.14 patch and put the files into $AF_JRE_TOP/lib/fonts.
I'll update this blog post once Oracle has published an official fix for this.
Summary
While typically, some adjustments are necessary in pre-existing custom BI Publisher reports, upgrading to Analytics Publisher 12c is definitely worth it. The technical procedure is straight forward – and on issues easy to undo –, and the new capability to create proper xlsx files was long waited for.