Description

Different countries and regions have different decimal seperators. For example - 

We have a need to display values using the ., and ,. separator depending on the country running the report.

In Italy a number should be 1.000.000,00 where in the US it would be 1,000,000.00. This is not specific to currencies but rather all numbers that leverage decimal seperators. 

Oracle Fusion front-end provides very easy selectors for how a user wants to see their currencies formatted, we'd like something similar for decimal formatting for all values made available within OTBI to reduce the amount of customization required.
 

Number fields in OTBI XPT Reports provide the ability under Preferences --> Data Formatting a Formatting mask should easily give the ability for a user to format values using standard combinations (much like you can in any MS Office product). This would allow for PDFs, Excel Outputs etc to format based on the quick setting within the report itself. e.g. #,##0.00 or #.##0,00 etc.

After submitting an SR we were told that the Formatting Mask within the XPT template is very limited and we were never able to get it to work. While we have the option to perform the formatting in a BIP template or convert values to text and format within the SQL both options create significant limitations when attempting to treat the numbers as "numbers" for reporting and analysis. 

Use Case and Business Need

Some reports are required for statutory reporting and the decimal seperator means different values in different countries and regions. Creating a report in BIP required often complex combinations of formats to facilitate the same result. If we want a report that is quickly customizable we have opted to run the report as an XPT output (seeded functionality), however, the XPT output has limited us in how values are presented. 

These reports are often submitted to government entities and must meet certain requirements.

The XPT Template number formatting is very limited and skewed toward those countries that use the ,. seperator for decimals. 

More details

While guidance does exist on how to create a format for a BI Publisher Template - for some use cases, an OTBI XPT or Analysis is easier and allows for easier long-term maintenance.

Unrelated but helpful -

https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/bi12214/bip/BIPRD/BIPRD.pdf

Original Idea Number: 72acedbc7a