HTML Formatting issues in EBS R12 XML Publisher Remittance Advice Emails aka. Use Inline CSS Styles in BIP

Apologies for the cryptic title on this one. The issue is a simple but subtle one ... and if you're not an eBusiness Suite customer, but interested in the BIP HTML formatting part, please read on as the discussion may be relevant.

In the Oracle eBusiness Suite Release 12 there is an out-of-the-box solution for sending Payables Remitttance Advice notices via Email. The program is "Send Separate Remittance Advices" and is integrated into the Payments Process. The standard solution utilizes XML Publisher under the covers, but (at the time of writing) has been coded to force HTML output for the Email content and uses its own delivery mechanism, rather than a more flexible bursting one that could attach PDFs to emails. Now, this means there are a couple of limitations with the output format for these Remittance Advice notices:

1. The out-of-the-box HTML generated by XML / BI Publisher uses CSS Stylesheets as opposed to Inline CSS. This causes formatting issues with some specific Email Clients (such as GMail) as described by this "old" but still relevent post. This is the main focus of this article and I'll give details of a workaround.
2. The use of HTML means from a document printing perspective a pixel-perfect format is tough to achieve.
3. Images e.g. Company Logos, need to be referenced in the HTML and hence need to be publicly accessible on a web server. This also means that when Supplier's receive the Remittance Advice emails will probably not have the images displayed by default and they'll get the "some pictures have been blocked to help prevent the sender from identifying your computer ... click here to download images" or similar spam/tracking warnings.

So the out-of-the-box solution has these gotcha's until such time as it uses a "fixed-format", "all content embedded in email" delivery method such as attaching a PDF to the email with the advice details...

BUT WAIT, there may be workarounds.

For Issue 1. we can tell XML / BI Publisher to embed Inline CSS rather than CSS Stylesheets using the following undocumented XML Publisher configuration. Place the following configuration in the xdo.cfg file and put it in eBusiness Suite $XDO_TOP/resource directory. Usual caveats apply; please test this before rolling to Production. Also be aware that this may affect all HTML output, with output file sizes likely to increase.

<config version="1.0.0"  xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/config/">
   <properties>
    <!-- html-css-embedding valid values  embed-to-element | embed-to-header | externalize -->
       <property  name="html-css-embedding">embed-to-element</property>
   </properties>
</config>

For Issue 2. one trick is to place your formatting inside a Table and fix the width / height to that which you require. This may take a smidgen of tweaking, but at least you can get something that looks and prints nicely.

For Issue 3 ... well, I'm still working that one - no workaround from Support yet to embed the images in the HTML. Will keep you posted. UPDATE: Enhancement request (ER) Bug 9834226 has been raised for the issue of inability to embed images in Remittance Advice.

Hope this helps.

Catch ya!
Gareth
This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com

References

• HTML emails vs Gmail, Yahoo & Hotmail
• Oracle Forums Thread HTML Format via Email

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