Hi everyone,
I've been reading some of the posts on this list about generating
PDFs and reports from WebObjects, and also getting really frustrated
with the "impedance match" between EO and something like
JasperReports (which seems to expect people to write sql queries to
extract data).
What I'm thinking of doing for the couple of projects I'm working on,
and for anyone else who wants to use it, is writing some kind of
reporting framework/subsystem that integrates well with collections
of data objects.
My first-cut vague design would require objects that may be included
in a report to be JavaBeans (use getXX and setXX), and to implement a
simple interface (maybe 2 methods?). The report design would be in
XML, which the reporting engine would use to query the collection of
data objects and construct an intermediate representation (an in-
memory DOM tree?) which could then be transformed to one of a number
of output formats using XSL or FO or what have you.
For one of my projects, the final reports will need to include charts
and some reasonably detailed analysis of the data as well.
Does happen to know of anything similar that already exists? Is there
perhaps an XSL engine out there that allows a straightforward mapping
between elements and beans?
And, if I was to begin to write such a package, would others find it
useful?
Thanks in advance,
Jarvis
PS:
I imagine the report design XML would look something like:
<report>
<page size="a4" orientation="landscape"/>
<repeat object="Person" name="Person">
<qualifier>
<equal key="city" value="Melbourne"/>
</qualifier>
<sort priority="1" key="surname" order="ascending" />
<sort priority="2" key="firstname" order="ascending" />
<record newpage="always">
<box x="10mm" y="10mm" height="50mm" width="100mm">
Good afternoon, <field>Person.firstname</field>
</box>
&c
... Which I imagine translates to "list those Person objects where
city="Melbourne", and output the message in a positioned box." After
passing through my imaginary report engine, the intermediate
representation might look like:
<report>
<page size="a4" orientation="landscape"/>
<record newpage="always">
<box x="10mm" y="10mm" height="50mm" width="100mm">
Good afternoon, John
</box>
...
<record newpage="always">
<box x="10mm" y="10mm" height="50mm" width="100mm">
Good afternoon, Susan
</box>
which coud then be translated into HTML or PDF or what have you by XSL.
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