{"id":153,"date":"2020-02-24T09:02:32","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T14:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabrielguzman.com\/blog\/?p=153"},"modified":"2020-02-24T11:38:46","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T16:38:46","slug":"apex-office-print-101-oracle-apex-document-printing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabrielguzman.com\/blog\/en\/apex-office-print-101-oracle-apex-document-printing\/","title":{"rendered":"APEX Office Print 101: Oracle APEX Document Printing"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the beginning of a series of entries that revolve around<\/span><\/span> APEX Office Print<\/a> and its integration with<\/span><\/span> Oracle APEX<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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A usual requirement from the clients with whom I have worked, and that have applications in Oracle APEX, is to be able to print their data, reports, and forms quickly, with options for multiple formats and types of documents.<\/span> Every Oracle APEX consultant has faced this issue at least once in his career, which can cause headaches since there are not many ways to do this out of the box, and the customization options are quite limited.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The decision to create Printer Friendly pages (an option that many of us considered when we were working with previous APEX versions like 3.x and 4.x) causes a huge technological debt, leaving the application at the mercy of each browser particularities and any change that the theme and templates assigned to the application may suffer in the future.<\/p>\n

Several external solutions can help solve this problem, including BI Publisher, PL \/ PDF, and AOP, the latter being the one we will be checking in this post.<\/p>\n

Presenting, APEX Office Print <\/strong><\/h3>\n

AOP<\/a> allows you to generate documents and reports with a highly customized format, based on templates that are sent along with the information to be included in the final document in JSON format. Such templates can be intended for Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, or HTML.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Its architecture is based on a web server with the ability to scale itself depending on the number of available cores, waiting for requests that come with a JSON payload.<\/span> This server can be used for both local deployments and the Cloud, and it has REST and PL \/ SQL APIs, as well as an Oracle APEX plugin that allows for a quick integration of the app reports with the tool.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"AOP<\/a>
APEX Office Print Architecture (Source: http:\/\/apexofficeprint.com\/docs\/)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

AOP is a template-based tool, and those templates can be created in any editor and uploaded to the application files to be invoked by the plugin.<\/span> The tool supports templates for multiple formats and handles different tags to define the location and manipulation of the data that is being sent to the server.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to the integration with APEX that I mentioned previously, we find several use cases:<\/span><\/p>\n