Re: Next assignment - Reports -- WEB400

Your post seemed to be more about execution rather than design so I didn't wade into the design side but the designer side has always been easy on one hand (the drag and drop metaphor) vs very hard (understanding the relationships between the data available for the report). The first part, I think has been solved. iReport and BIRT along with Crystal Reports and tools from Sequel all have drag and drop functionality making the actually formatting of the report quite easy. The difficulty has always been in making sure that the data presented in the report relate correctly (the joins between tables are correct). This is the hardest part of a report designer and why most report writing tools aren't end user tools. Usually you buy a designer package and a runtime package and you would never put the designer tool in the hands of an end user because they would rarely understand the nuances of how the tables relate.

When I worked for NCS I was the product manager for developing a report writing tool that "end users" could use. It became an almost impossible task when all the requirements were pulled together (this was back in 1992 when GUI's were just getting to the point of viability). We were able to solve the "join" problems by building a data dictionary that determined the proper join relationships in the background as data elements were chosen but things like totals, subtotals, counts, averages and the like were difficult. Subreports were out of the question given the technology available. Eventually, NCS decided to license a third party tool (a horrible thing that ran in Windows 3.1) and, more recently, just told customers to talk to Sequel and got a referral fee. Bottom line: Report designers are a lot harder than report runtimes.

I'll look into being able to execute BIRT reports as well as Jasper with this open source project. It shouldn't be all that difficult. The real challenge is providing a report designer. I hope to solve that using some "widgets" that handle the complexity in the background. They can also be used in HTML (Web 2.0) designs.

I plan to generally post the availability here at in Midrange of the 0.4 release today sometime.

Pete

Nathan Andelin wrote:

Pete,

Regarding Jasper Reports, I mentioned that I thought performance was poor in the Student Transcript case, but that was a purely subjective observation, and I need to keep all options open at this point; as I mentioned, I'm not too keen about reinventing the wheel.

I followed-up on Aaron's suggestion about BIRT, and stepped through the Flash demo at the Eclipse Web site. The report designer plugin for Eclipse looks pretty good. Actually, most WYSIWYG report designers follow the familiar metaphor of dragging data source elements to report bands (header, footer, group, detail, etc.). I plan on going through more of the Birt Documentation later.

I got a call from Sal Stangarone at www.mrc-productivity.com. They offer developer tools for reporting, and I appreciated their input.

I'll probably have a few more observations and post them in a reply, later.

Thanks,

Nathan.