Customize PO Output for Communication Report

Here is a summary of what I have learnt of PO Output for Communication report on my recent engagement.

What is PO Output for Communication?

PO Output for Communication usually called as PO Print Report is one of the most important and standard report in Purchasing to communicate Purchase order information to supplier through an email in the format of PDF or text.

How to run PO Output for Communication report?

1. This reports gets triggered as soon as a PO is approved. An email is sent to the supplier with PO information as an attachment and a copy of email is sent to the email address configured in the profile option “PO: Secondary Email address” as a backup.
2. We can also view this report output by opening an Approved Purchase Order and then navigating to “Inquire –> View Document” through menu option.
3. We can also run “PO Output for Communication” manually as a concurrent request.

How does PO Output for Communication report work?

PO Output for Communication is a Java concurrent program which is triggered through a PO Approval workflow. This java program generates XML data whose XSD(XML Schema Definition) is defined as XML Publisher Data definition and output layout is defined in XSL-FO format as a template in XML Publisher.

Data Definition Name: Standard Purchase Order Data Source
Template Name: Standard Purchase Order Stylesheet

PO Approval workflow uses standard package “PO_COMMUNICATION_PVT.POXMLGEN” to generate XML Data. The XML data generated contains all the columns of the below SQL views

1. PO_HEADERS_XML
2. PO_LINES_XML
3. PO_LINE_LOCATIONS_XML
4. PO_DISTRIBUTION_XML
5. PO_PRICE_ADJUSTMENTS_XML
6. PO_RELEASE_XML

How to create a custom layout for PO Output for Communication report?

To customize the layout of this report one must make a copy of seeded XSLFO stylesheet and modify it. But modifying XSLFO is not that easy as many of us dont know XSLFO markup language. The other way is to create traditional rtf layout. Below are the steps to apply rtf layout for this report.

courtesy - http://oracleappsdna.com/2015/04/faqs-of-po-output-for-communication-report/