Limitation of BI Publisher report using RTF template having more than 63 columns and how to resolve it.

Limitation of BI Publisher report using RTF template having more than 63 columns.

 

Issue:

Microsoft word has a limitation to accommodate a maximum of 63 columns only in a given table.

However, we had a requirement to add more than 63 columns to a report. In such a case, the report was designed to have an outer table with 2 columns and then have nested tables with the first 63 report columns in the first column of the outer table and the rest of the columns in the second column of the outer table.

 

Although this approach works fine when there is small amount of data, it fails with java heap memory issues for a huge data volume.

 

Outer Table Column1	Outer Table Column2
Inner Table1 Col1 Inner Table1 Col2 …… …… ….. Inner Table1 Col63	Inner Table2 Col64 Inner Table2 Col65       Inner Table2 last Column

 

 

Solution:

To avoid such issues for reports with greater than 63 columns, Oracle recommends using XSL-FO templates.

 

Approach:

• Have only one table with just 63 columns in the RTF template.
• Open the ‘BI Publisher Template Viewer’ tool
• Choose the working directory and select the RTF template with the 63 columns
• With the RTF template selected, go to Tools -> Generate XSL File from… -> RTF Template
• Choose a folder and provide the XSL file name
• Open the XSL file and add the additional columns manually.
• Register the file as an XSL-FO template.