EBS Data Template GUI – So you’re saying there’s a chance?! Day One from OOW’11

I’m out at Oracle Open World 2011 this week and started off Sunday with attending a number of SIGs and regional OAUG sessions.  The EBS – BI Publisher SIG was essentially a Q&A session and there were quite a few people in attendance.  From the Oracle BIP team, Nikolas Psomas  and Klaus Fabian were there to help answer the audience’s questions.

A question that seemed to get a lot of attention regarded a tool for editing/creating Data Templates.  If you’ve worked with Data Templates and created them from scratch or tried to edit seeded ones, you know that the syntax can be a bit difficult.  It’s XML, while that’s a friendly language for computers to communicate with, the strictness of the syntax doesn’t make it the easiest for us humans to open up notepad and start typing it out. While the latest version of BIP Enterprise 11g includes a GUI data model editor, there currently is no GUI editor to create these templates for Oracle EBS.

Klaus and Nikolas from Oracle left the door open just a crack, mentioning that an editor or a version of the editor found in BIP-Enterprise might be made available to the EBS world at some point.  They also mentioned that the best way to make  this happen would be to get some names attached to the already existing enhancement for this functionality.  So… I would suggest that if this is something that you are struggling with you take them up on their offer and get your company’s name associated with that enhancement (open an SR with BIP team).  The more people that express an interest, the more likely that Oracle will act…