Hi Mike,
Sorry not to reply sooner. Thought I'd pick this thread up from your
original question.
On 09/12/2010 17:41, Mike Burton wrote:
To improve my understanding of Isis and to establish new potential features, I'm adopting a
"devil's advocate" approach by looking at features I add to my projects and asking
"can (or should) Isis do this"
In this way I thought of _reports_, with filtering, sub/totals, and output to
PDF/ CDR/ XLS.
The data to report on may be Domain Objects, or joins / query results (perhaps
"ViewModels" ie similar to "Views" in database parlance.)
How would Isis approach this?
The way we've done this sort of thing on the big Irish project is to
either extract information out of the domain objects themselves, or to
create a "view model" that aggregates relevant information into a single
transient (never persisted) object. We then hand this raw information
off to an injected domain service, which does the actual work of
generating the PDF, XLS etc.
For example, for sending out letters we have a FormCommunication (this
is the view model). This references a Customer, some of the relevant
relationships of that Customer (eg spouse/child etc), Benefits and so
on. We then use the XmlSnapshot capability (see either my book or the
new applib documentation, chapter 12) to generate XML. From this we can
do whatever: apply XSLT, use Xpath to extract info, etc etc.
So... is there functionality missing from Isis? Well, only insofar
that'd it'd be nice to have a bunch of these domain services
(PdfRenderService, XlsGenerationService etc) available for reuse.
This'd be a nice project for someone to pick up. I was thinking that
eventually these precanned domain services might live under
trunk/domain/services (you'll notice a placeholder in the maven modules
page on the wiki [1]).
HTH,
Dan
[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ISIS/MavenModules
Best regards
Mike Burton
