Generating Reports using Oracle Enterprise Scheduling Services (ESS)

Let me start of by stating that Oracle ESS does not provide any in-built mechanism or feature for generating reports. Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BIP) is the report generation and delivery engine for Fusion Applications and ESS simply takes advantage of this.

Here is some high level information on how ESS-BIP job submission works. The best part for application developers is that, they do not have to implement the code to invoke BIP from ESS; they just need to focus on defining the ESS job definition using  BIP or Java JobType and specify the report attributes. ESS invokes the BIP agent API to submit a job report request, which will be picked up by the BI Publisher report processors. BIP agent API implementation internally calls asynchronous web service to generate data and process all delivery channels for that job report request. As part of ESS-BIP job submission, request parameters like requestId, job definition, job package name etc are updated in the ApplSession, which is propagated to the BIP server. Callback to the configured ESS web service happens after BIP finishes a report job.

ESS global submission user interface 'Output' tab provides options through which an end user can specify layout templates for reports, document formats (PDF, RTF), and report destinations (email, fax, printer). Depending on the file management group (FMG) property set for the ESS job definition, the relevant post-processing action is selected for the job. Post-processing actions can also be invoked programmatically from a client using a Java or web service API.

Also, you might want to check out the BI Publisher report bursting capability, where in report will slice the data to generate multiple output files by identifying required format and delivery options during report runtime. Each output can be delivered to multiple delivery channels. ESS Central Submission UI allows developers to specify bursting or non bursting using property name 'outputCollection' with value 'Y' or 'N'. Value 'N' indicates that no further BI report post processing action should be allowed.

Note that Report output (bursting and regular BIP report) will be stored in BIP repository.

As always, please refer the official Oracle ESS/Fusion Apps Developers Guide for more details.