New XML file output functionality in Easy Reporter 2.12

Easy Reporter provides the ability to export data into a variety of formats, including Excel and PDF and it can even be used to build multi-record format interface files (you can watch our webinar on that topic here). One of the most common requests we receive about Easy Reporter’s capabilities for generating interface files is “Can you export the data as XML?” Well, we’re excited to say that as part Easy Reporter’s 2.12 release in Q4 2015, users will now have the ability to produce elements based XML files. I’ll walk you through just a brief example below of how it will work. It leverages report data in Easy Reporter. What I mean is if you can get the data into an Easy Reporter, you can produce an XML document with it.

In this blog, I am going to show you a basic example of the new XML functionality. The document I will produce in my example needs to contain a node structure regarding an employee. Let’s include their name, company code and salary. Below is an example of a report generated in Easy Reporter with that data.

In the upcoming release 2.12 of Easy Reporter, we have added an XML builder in our “Output to file settings” options. Here, we can lay out what the node/element structure looks like for our file.

I created a simple structure in this blog, but you can add any fields you need and you can have nested sections within a section. For example, you might have basic employee data, but under that section you might have a communications section that is separate. You can build your structure as deep as your schema requires.

Once you have your structure built out, you assign the name of the tag and what fields you want from your report to assign to the element. You can use fixed values in the tag as you may have to display static information like a company ID number or something for your vendor to recognize you.

Run the report like would any other report and it will produce an XML document as output. The example in this post is not a complex one. As you can see from my instructions, it was actually simple to do. The benefit of this new functionality is that it will take much more complex processes and requirements that normally require a week of ABAP development or more and reduce the effort required to minutes.

I hope you are as excited as I am for our 2.12 release! Happy reporting.