Since I’m always in to review stuff, I gladly accepted their invitation.

At first glance, the book seems very interesting, even more since we are on the verge of an upgrade from Siebel 7.8 to Siebel 8.1, so the book might help us there. I’ve also noticed some chapters about BI Publisher – with which I’ve been working for a few months.

Because English is not my mother tongue and the book is nearly 600 pages, it might take some time for me to read it, so please bear with me, but you can be sure that I’ll write the review.

It turned out that BI Publisher standard sets all fields of a PDF report to readonly. The PDF template is filled in with data coming from Siebel but when the report is generated, all form fiels are readonly.

To change this behaviour, you only have to create a new configuration file overwriting the standard settings. This configuration file is named xdo.cfg and has to be saved under <JRE_TOP>/jre/lib
Remark: no default configuration file is provided

The configuration file with the propertie to make all PDF report fields editable should look like this:

<config version=”1.0.0″
xmlns=”http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/config/”>
<!– Properties –>
<properties>
<!– PDF Security –>
<property name=”all-field-readonly”>false</property>
</properties>
</config>

Once the file is in place, the only thing left to do is restarting BI Publisher.