Frank Schönheit - Sun Microsystems Germany wrote:
Hi Marc,
thanks for your feedback, too!
(I will spare this for the next people, I think. Whoever answers here:
please accept my ahead-hurrying thanks :)
- make reporting working and easily usable for low and mid complexity
tasks (not having tested it for a few months)
sorry, that's too unspecific. You know, "make Base better" is already
covered - the result of making this concrete is in the feature pool.
What I need from you guys is more concrete items we forgot about.
Hello,
I hope Marc doesn't mind if I jump into his thread here.
One somewhat more concrete thought, for a report wizard: Grouping on
repeating values.
It is common to produce reports based on a query that results in
repeating values.
These repeating values often (almost always perhaps) represent a value
that will be used
to create a grouping. For example:
Think of a simple invoicing system with both an invoice and
invoicedetail table.
A common query for reporting against these tables would be
SELECT
"Invoices".* ,
"InvoiceDetails".*
FROM
"Invoices" INNER JOIN "InvoiceDetails"
ON
"Invoices"."InvoiceID" = "InvoiceDetails"."InvoiceID"
Likely then there will be repeating values in the result set for those
columns supplied by
the Invoice table. The report wizard could use this information to
determine that a group
will be formed for Invoice. At first glance this would seem to require
that the wizard execute the query
and run a pass over the result set. However, much the same as the form
wizard and
query designer's Add Table function, perhaps the report wizard could
check for Foreign
Key relations and use these to both determine that a repeating set of
values can be expected,
and to determine which column to use for the grouping. In this case the
choice would be
"Invoices"."InvoiceID". (of course there might be a big advantage in
running against
a 'trial run' of the result set as this may be more useful to the users
not so skilled as
to be creating FK relations in the first place - which may be precisely
the users most
helped by such a feature...hmmm, circles in circles..)
Anyway -
The wizard might then ask the user which columns from the Invoice table
to include in the
group header. Asking in a subsequent step which columns to include in
the detail section
from the InvoiceDetails table.
Thanks
Drew
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