BI Publisher – Best Practices for Modeling RTF Templates – Part 1/2

Creating templates with Microsoft Word for BI Publisher is a good way to produce reports without having a lot of programming skills (assuming that you have already the data model done).

Split to Conquer

Don’t create all your report in one single RTF template, use Sub-Template. If you split the content correctly, you will be able to have a cleaner “main template” with a lot of Sub-Template that you can later on re-use on other reports. Lets say you need to print the client address, with one Sub-Template will reduce the errors by not having to maintain several snippets of “addresses code” throught out all you reports.

The ¶ mark is your friend

Always have the paragraph mark option (¶) active when editing your template. On a pixel perfect tool, you need to pay attention with not only the paragraphs but also the spaces. Having this option active you will be able to faster detect situations like

<?if:TEST='true'?> <?if:TEST1='true'?>..

The space will appear in a form of a dot, like shown in the image below.

These spaces can generate several headache on why your layout is not the way you want it.

BI Publisher markups

Using the BI Publisher markups option 1), will make your template cleaner and easier to read, but if you start copy-pasting, sometimes the references to the objects will be lost, which won’t happen with the option 2).

Since there are several options that are not avaiable on the BI Publisher plug-in, for Microsoft Word, you will may end up with both options for the markups and to unify the usage throught out the template, I prefer to use the option 2).

Other best pratices will come up on part 2, stay tuned.