PeopleSoft.Net

Importing BI Publisher Sub-template to the Main Template for Testing local environment

Recently I was working on BI publisher RTF template and I had several Sub-templates to be included into the main template. Firstly, I wanted to test these Sub-templates locally before pushing it to development environment. I tried what PeopleBooks were suggested. The PeopleBooks says;

Testing a Sub-Template in Microsoft Word

You should test your template and sub-template using Template Builder before uploading to PeopleTools to make your sub-template is accessible to your template on the file system.

Use the following syntax when importing:


<?import:file:C:///Template_Directory/subtemplate_file.rtf?>

Notice the triple slashes and the use of the actual file name instead of template ID.

When your design is complete, you can change the import statement back to make the sub-template available to the main template in PeopleTools environment.

I followed the same syntax above. However, I could not work it out as I was having these errors when I try to preview the main RTF template as a PDF. After bit of a research I found out that I need to include these custom properties in the xdo.xfg file.

<property name="xdk-secure-io-mode">false</property>
<property name="xslt-scalable">true</property>

Meaning of each property and their values as follows;

Here are some of the references I checked while figuring out this issue

How to correctly generate BI/XML publisher Excel output from RTF template

While ago I had a issue where BI publisher which was not correctly generating Excel output format file. This particular problem happened with delivered report, SSR_TSRPT which is the Transcript Report in campus solutions. We have customised the delivered report by adding our own version of template file to the report definition. The Template File is of RTF format and the report output was defaulted to XLS format type.

The problem was it generated the report in Excel format and it was generating the file in .xlsx format and the RTF to Excel conversion was not happy with the new format. Bit of dig around and I found out that due to the new PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.53 upgrade for the BI Publisher, PeopleSoft has added new configurations to the PeopleTools settings to control report attributes that are specific to PeopleSoft implementation of BI Publisher. The specific property is “psxp_excel_outputformat”. According to PeopleBooks;

So to make it compatible with older versions of Excel and to generate the output correctly, I modified properties of the report by changing psxp_excel_outputformat to XLS-MHTML format as described above, the changes are imposed in report level as follows;