Re: Request for feedback on proposed project
Re: Request for feedback on proposed project
- Subject: Re: Request for feedback on proposed project
- From: Jarvis Cochrane <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 23:06:03 +0800
Hi,
Thanks for all the interesting and thought-provoking feedback!
The three themes that I read in the feedback that I've recieved are:
a) it's an interesting idea
b) it's likely to be very slow
c) why not leverage the work that has already been done with Jasper
Reports?
Over the course of a particular project, I've been searching the web,
trying to work out how I was going to handle the reporting component
of the project. I've looked at JasperReports and DataVision a couple
of times (I write a minimal subclass of
JRAbstractBeanDataSourceProvider to experiment with this). I was also
very impressed with ReportMill when I came across that - but the
budget won't stretch that far.
Taking JasperReports as a model, what would I do differently?
(I'm by no means an expert in JasperReports, so if I'm wrong on some
point, please feel free to correct me! Also, please don't think I'm
beating up on JasperReports here - I'm trying to work out how best to
solve a problem, and also trying to get an idea of whether or not
there's a need for yet another not quite complete project in the open
source world...)
Firstly, unless I'm using SQL, I'm not aware of a way of embedding a
query into the report. I don't think that I can use a custom
DataSourceProvider to get access to my EOs or beans, and include a
specification in the report that specifies which EOs/beans to include
in the report. The selection of what's in the report looks to be the
responsibility of the DataSourceProvider.
I would like be able to specify the "query" that generates the data
as part of the design of the report that displays it.
Secondly, if I use SQL, I lose access to the custom logic in my EOs/
beans. Potentially then, I need to either reproduce some piece of
logic in the SQL statements, or write a "scriptlet" to embed in the
report design.
So, I'd like to be able to access and reuse the calculations etc that
I've already written in the EOs.
And thirdly, JasperReports seems to view its source data as a table
of records and fields - just as you would expect to get from an SQL
query. I wonder if a "collection of objects" model might be easier to
work with in some situations.
I've found other things about JasperReports (and Datavision, and
JFreeReport...) that irritate, but those are the main three.
The Holy Grail for me is a reporting tool that I can give to non-
programmers to use to design their own reports, and which doesn't
involve writing SQL or writing custom Java classes to generate
different views of the data. Some kind of a gui tool to navigate the
data structures would be heaven.
For the particular applications I have in mind, the data sets will be
quite small. Hundreds of records, rather than hundreds of thousands,
and there is the possibility of generating reports overnight or
during idle time and caching them.
Perhaps someone can suggest a better way of using JasperReports than
I've yet discovered?
Thanks again for the feedback so far,
Jarvis
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden