> -----Original Message----- > From: River Tarnell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2008 4:10 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Toolserver-l] collaborative report generator? > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Larry Pieniazek: > > I was struck by the thought that > > the specification and generation of reports is something that many > > commercial tools do. > > while i imagine there are several tools that could be adapted > to our use, i think it makes more sense to NIH this
As a consultant in real life, I woud be remiss not to raise this as a possibility... why reinvent wheels unless one needs to? But on the other hand... if it IS needful, an examination of why often flushes out additional requirements and good stuff. > for the usual reasons: > > - - it's very simple; maybe even easier than learning and > adapting an existing system It depends on how powerful of a report generator/designer you want... a simple one is easy enough to do but one as robust as Cognos isn't.... it would be a major development effort. What are the requirements here? If simplicity is all that's needed, then yes. > - - we can make it work exactly how we want (in particular, > being easy for users to use) This is a strong plus for doing it ourselves, especially since we don't necessairly want random end users running random queries. > - - the MediaWiki schema is kind of weird and teaching > external software to use it is a pain Most of these tools run against MySQL, not against anything else. So would any query tool we did ourselves, presumably, so this isn't a factor. MW has a weird schema, but that's going to be the same either way > - - it's fun ;) This is a strong plus for doing it ourselves too! In the end, I have no idea yet what the right answer is but talking about it should help. Larry Pieniazek Hobby mail: Lar at Miltontrainworks dot com _______________________________________________ Toolserver-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l
