FROM THE BLOG

BI Publisher 11G: Footers and Headers in RTF template.

This is our first post for BI Publisher 11G that is meant to save others that have little or none experience on the tool but still, need to get the job done.

This post is about a relatively simple task; add a dynamic footer or header to your RTF template in MS Word using BI Publisher plugin, and the footer/header need to reference dynamic data (data model fields). In the official documentation for BI Publisher 11G (here) is referred that

At the time of this writing, Microsoft Word does not support form fields in the header and footer. You must therefore insert the placeholder syntax directly into the template (basic RTF method), or use the start body/end body syntax described in the next section.

You can certainly try to follow the “start body / end body” syntax they suggest. It may or it may not work depending on your circumstances. We will, however, show a different approach, that will work correctly if you need to make the thing work ASAP. We based our solution in this post: http://bipconsulting.blogspot.com/2009/11/common-header-and-footer-style-with-sub.html

The only difference is that you don’t actually need to create a new sub-template nor anything extra, you can do the whole thing in the same RTF. All you need to do is somewhere in the template (it won’t matter where you put it since it won’t be rendered) put the following:

<?template:footer?>

STAMP	Signed:	SIGNATURE	Dated: RAN_DATE
	SIGNATOR

PLEASE READ CONDITIONS ON THE BACK

<?end template?>

After this is done, you can reference the “footer” (you can name the template as you want) template inside an actual MS Word footer:

And that is!