Monday, November 02, 2009

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

Related Posts

15 comments:

Tony Tallmadge said...

Hi Gareth,

Any other undocumented XML Publisher configurations related to HTML output?

Thanks!

Gareth said...

Hi Tony,

Not at this stage, will post them as I find them.

Regards,
Gareth

KBender said...

Hi Gareth,
I am trying to figure out where the email template is stored so that my client can customize the email that is sent to the supplier.
Where is the actual email template?
Thank you so much for your assistance with this.
Kim

Gareth said...

Hi Kim,
Its a BI/XML Publisher Layout Template. The standard/default one is XML Publisher Administrator, Templates, find code IBYR_SRA or name "Separate Remittance Advice", under template files, click the Download icon to get file IBYR_SRA.rtf.

Regards,
Gareth

Chris said...

Hi Gareth,

I'd love to know when there's a solution or workaround for issue #3.

Thanks,
Chris

Gareth said...

Hi Chris,
There is something related to 3 in patch 9142028 but I have yet to try it.
Regards,
Gareth

Pahadia said...

Hi Gareth,
I tried to implement your solution but it didn't work. My requirement is to send remittance advice with logo to suppliers. Email functionality works but in gmail it gives plain text and in Microsoft outlook it is dropping logo. Here is the xdodelivery.cfg detail. Could you point me out what wrong am I doing?





test.server.com
25



/tmp
true

embed-to-element
"application/pdf"



Thanks a lot for your feedback.

Pahadia said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Pahadia said...

Hmnnn...I am not HTML/XML guru so didn't realize that my file would not be uploaded with tags...here is the file again after removing < from first and > from last position

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?
config version="1.0.0" xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/delivery/config"
servers
server name="test_mail" type="smtp_email" default="true"
host>test.server.com25/tmptrueembed-to-element"application/pdf"</property
/properties
/config

Gareth said...

Hi Dinesh,
I have still not identified a way to resolve Issue 3 for Payables Separate Remittance, although there are solutions for other documents, e.g. Dunning Letters. If you have setup the URL to your logo, you may get the "Click here to display images in this email" or similar. In your RTF make sure the logo has a URL reference and that it is publicly resolveable, ie. you can put the logo URL in your browser and the image appears.
Regards,
Gareth

Unknown said...

Hi Gareth,
Did you get solution for issue#3.
I am Facing the same problem.
When i run remittance via payment process profile, the mail sent is proper with proper formatting and proper logo.
But when i resend the remittance via Send Separate Remittance Advices program, the logo disappears.
Regards, Swapnali

Gareth said...

Hi Swapnali,

Enhancement request (ER) Bug 9834226 has been raised for the issue of inability to embed images in Remittance Advice.

Regards,
Gareth

Shalabhsneha Katdare said...

Hi,

Any chance to set this property via API call?

Thanks,
Shalabhsneha

Unknown said...

Hello Gareth,


Is there a way to send the remittance advice through an attachment like an excel or PDF.

We also need to some fields to the remittance. How do we achieve this.

Thanks,
Sushma

Gareth said...

Hi Sushma,
No option using standard extension for PDF / Excel attachments, there is enhancement request logged for it ER Bug 8208646.
Adding custom fields is supported and can be done by extension PL/SQL package body IBY_FD_EXTRACT_EXT_PUB.

Regards,
Gareth