Report definition

Report definition contains details like what data should be shown, how to get that data, layout of the report, parameters for the report, and at what frequency the report should be generated. For example, a particular report provides details about the performance of a BPEL process, the data for this report is shown in tabular format and one pie chart and this report is generated every 24 hours, this report is also emailed out to some specific email ids.

Report element

Report elements are reusable components that users can include in the report definition when defining new reports. For example "Table from SQL" element can be used to extract data from repository, and to use this element the user needs to provide a query. At runtime this query is executed against the repository and the data is inserted into the report.

Information publishing system provides support for scheduling of the reports, using that the user can define a schedule from the console to generate the reports. Generated reports are saved in the repository. Also, these reports can be sent out by emails.