Simple BIP Report help needed

Question

Hi All ,
I am bit new to BI Publisher,I have done plenty of Oracle reports 6i and 10g.
Have read the BIPublisher Guide as well,but could not understand a few points.
suppose I want to build a very very simple report like
Sysdate Sysdate Sysdate
16-Oct-08 16-Oct-08 16-Oct-08
step 1) I will write the following query in the Data Model and store/save it.
select sysdate ,sysdate,sysdate from dual.
Step 2) In the layout model I want to use .rtf layout .So in the MS word .rdf document I create /insert
a table with 2 rows and 3 columns,where 1st row will have Sysdate in all 3 columns as header.
Now to fetch date 3times(the data) from the above query,WHAT is going to be my next steps ????
I am not able to understand the link between the layout(.rtf document) and XML document.
Please can someone reply to this question and let me know ?
Regards
Sunny

Answer 1

I added a useless parameter just so you could see where parms should go...
Datatemplate:
<dataTemplate name="A_SIMPLE_REPORT">
     <properties>
          <property name="xml_tag_case" value="upper"/>
     </properties>
     <parameters>
          <parameter name="P_PARM" dataType="character"/>
     </parameters>
     <dataQuery>
          <sqlStatement name="QUERYNAME">
               <![CDATA[
select sysdate SYSDATE1
, sysdate SYSDATE2
, sysdate SYSDATE3
from dual
where 'XYZ' = nvl(:P_PARM, 'XYZ')
]]>
          </sqlStatement>
     </dataQuery>
     <dataStructure>
          <group name="G_UPPERGROUP" dataType="varchar2" source="QUERYNAME">
               <element name="SYSDATE1" dataType="varchar2" value="SYSDATE1"/>
               <element name="SYSDATE2" dataType="varchar2" value="SYSDATE2"/>
<element name="SYSDATE3" dataType="varchar2" value="SYSDATE3"/>
          </group>
     </dataStructure>
     <dataTrigger name="afterReportTrigger" source="A_SIMPLE_REPORT.afterreport()"/>
</dataTemplate>
XML OUPUT:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<A_SIMPLE_REPORT>
<LIST_G_UPPERGROUP>
<G_UPPERGROUP>
<SYSDATE1>2008-10-16T18:20:19.000-05:00</SYSDATE1>
<SYSDATE2>2008-10-16T18:20:19.000-05:00</SYSDATE2>
<SYSDATE3>2008-10-16T18:20:19.000-05:00</SYSDATE3>
</G_UPPERGROUP>
</LIST_G_UPPERGROUP>
</A_SIMPLE_REPORT>
Hope this helps,
Scott
PS If you have been doing reports for as long as you say you prob. know this already...but I NEVER* trust Oracle to convert my dates. I convert them all to char, pass them and convert them on "the other side" (if needed). But, you can change the data type to date if you feel brave, but don't say I didn't warn you. ;-)