With the release of R12, Oracle had retired Client ADI, a tool that had been used for many things, amongst which was making FSG reports look pretty, and allowing users to drilldown into the financial information displayed on the reports to get more detailed information.
With the retirement of Client ADI, Oracle began to push Report Manager, a Report Repository tool that allows users to drill-down into FSG reports, as long as they have a report-specific Excel template assigned to them. I've been using Report Manager for some time, and I think it is a great tool to provide Management with access to the financial reports they need, as well as allowing them to discover what is behind the numbers (without bothering the folks in Accounting).
This week, I have been supporting a client go through User Acceptance Testing, possibly the most important stages of an implementation, when we came across an issue with Financial Statements (FSGs) in Report Manager that I hadn't seen before. We had built three Financial Statements for our client (an Income Statement, a Balance Sheet, and a Trial Balance) to be as flexible as possible, and we followed the industry-standards of defining row-sets with just Natural Accounts specified. This allows users to set segment overrides at run-time to report on, for example, a specific entity.
As well as building the Reports, we had built report specific Excel templates in Report Manager to allow users to drilldown into the reports. The templates looked great, but when we came to try and drilldown into the data, we kept seeing the same error:
java.lang.NullPointerException
It's a pretty generic error message which we had seen in HTML screens in the past, but never when trying to drilldown into FSGs. After checking and re-checking setups, I stumbled upon an "Undocumented feature" of R12.1.1 and later:
Notes 1091302.1 and 1273783.1 point to changes in the way you have to define FSGs. Rather than leaving segment value ranges in row sets and column sets as NULL, you now have to provide ranges for EVERY segment.
For example, to define a FSG line for 'Total Revenue" for a chart of account structure of Company, Cost Center, Natural Account, you used to be able to define the row as
Company: null-null
Cost Center: null-null
Natural Account: 40000-49999.
With the release of R12.1.1 (and later releases), you must define the same row as:
Company: 000-ZZZ
Cost Center: 0000-ZZZZ
Natural Account: 40000-49999.
In addition, your column definitions (which typically didn't include any segment values) now have to be defined the same way, with all-inclusive segment value ranges for each segment.
In our User Acceptance Testing, once the FSGs had been modified, we were able to drill down in the reports with no issues.
