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Posted to user@struts.apache.org by Joe Germuska <Jo...@Germuska.com> on 2003/09/19 23:56:16 UTC
[OT] Lightweight helper libraries for reporting?
Does anyone know of any good libraries for collecting report data?
To be clear -- I'm not interested in a full-scale reporting library
like JasperReports. I've looked at it, and while it looks cool, I
have some specific requirements it doesn't serve. I've also looked
at the Display tag library, and while it has its good and bad opints,
it's basically not what I need.
What I'm looking for is something into which I can throw a bunch of
beans of a common type and then ask it to do things like grouping,
group totals, grand totals, and the like. Basically, the model of a
report data set, independent of how it is populated or how it would
be displayed.
Have you seen my library?
Thanks in advance,
Joe
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperreports/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/displaytag/
--
--
Joe Germuska
Joe@Germuska.com
http://blog.germuska.com
"If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time."
--Jaron Lanier
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RE: [OT] Lightweight helper libraries for reporting?
Posted by Joe Germuska <Jo...@Germuska.com>.
At 14:43 +0800 9/22/03, Mohd Amin Mohd Din wrote:
>Maybe you could use http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/
Ah, I think you missed my first post. My users have almost infinite
flexibility both in entering search criteria as well as with what
data fields are displayed in the resulting output. I don't see how
to do that with JasperReports. If I were a power user, maybe I could
figure out some way to do all of that at runtime, but JasperReports
looks to me like its designed mostly for running statically defined
reports. I know you can pass in some parameters and such, but my
case seems like it's out of line with what JasperReports is designed
to do.
It does look promising for its target cases, and I plan to give it a
closer look when I have a project that is a better fit...
Joe
--
--
Joe Germuska
Joe@Germuska.com
http://blog.germuska.com
"If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time."
--Jaron Lanier
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RE: [OT] Lightweight helper libraries for reporting?
Posted by Mohd Amin Mohd Din <am...@nc.com.my>.
Maybe you could use http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/
-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Germuska [mailto:Joe@Germuska.com]
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 12:23 AM
To: Struts Users Mailing List
Subject: RE: [OT] Lightweight helper libraries for reporting?
David:
The main reason I'm not ready to use displaytag is because I need to
generate reports for more than just HTML output; my users will have
the choice to get a delimited file as well, or instead of HTML, and
they'll have the option to get the report mailed to them as well as
generated while-they-wait. I know that displaytag has some support
for export files, but I'm figuring it's more work than it's worth to
use a JSP tag library for asynchronous generation of a CSV file sent
as an email attachment.
My design is to have a model-level report returned from a report
service to a controller which can then send the report to various
renderers. I just haven't yet written classes to deal with common
report functions like grouping and totalling, and it seems like
something that would be generally useful.
I think displaytag is pretty impressive, and totally appropriate for
a model where the web page is the primary output form. I actually
find the decorator model a little frustrating, as it requires writing
and compiling code for view things which I'd prefer to have more
flexibly changeable in a JSP (at least it did a year ago when I used
it last) -- I'm pretty sure I had to compile a date format into a
column decorator; what happens when the client decides they want that
to change? I have to recompile the class? Or find someplace other
than displaytag to set a runtime property for the date format; that
seems awkward.
I think instead of a single "table" tag, it would be nice to have a
"table" tag which defined beans and made them available to nested
tags for various purposes, like many Struts tags do (html:messages,
logic:iterate, etc). This might be hard to do and still achieve
everything that displaytag does, but if I were really motivated, I'd
look at adapting displaytag to a model more like that...
Joe
At 22:59 -0400 9/19/03, David G Friedman wrote:
>Joe,
>
>I've been planning on using the displaytag library for that stuff when
I get
>to it next week. Why won't the decorator classes work for you to
perform
>summations of rows, groups, and so forth? I'm wondering why it won't
work
>for you in case the same reasons might apply to my application....
>
>For reference, an example of the decorators for summations of groups
and
>rows is here:
>http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/example-callbacks.jsp
>
>With their Java decorator class code example code here:
>http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/TotalWrapper.java.txt
--
--
Joe Germuska
Joe@Germuska.com
http://blog.germuska.com
"If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time."
--Jaron Lanier
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RE: [OT] Lightweight helper libraries for reporting?
Posted by Joe Germuska <Jo...@Germuska.com>.
David:
The main reason I'm not ready to use displaytag is because I need to
generate reports for more than just HTML output; my users will have
the choice to get a delimited file as well, or instead of HTML, and
they'll have the option to get the report mailed to them as well as
generated while-they-wait. I know that displaytag has some support
for export files, but I'm figuring it's more work than it's worth to
use a JSP tag library for asynchronous generation of a CSV file sent
as an email attachment.
My design is to have a model-level report returned from a report
service to a controller which can then send the report to various
renderers. I just haven't yet written classes to deal with common
report functions like grouping and totalling, and it seems like
something that would be generally useful.
I think displaytag is pretty impressive, and totally appropriate for
a model where the web page is the primary output form. I actually
find the decorator model a little frustrating, as it requires writing
and compiling code for view things which I'd prefer to have more
flexibly changeable in a JSP (at least it did a year ago when I used
it last) -- I'm pretty sure I had to compile a date format into a
column decorator; what happens when the client decides they want that
to change? I have to recompile the class? Or find someplace other
than displaytag to set a runtime property for the date format; that
seems awkward.
I think instead of a single "table" tag, it would be nice to have a
"table" tag which defined beans and made them available to nested
tags for various purposes, like many Struts tags do (html:messages,
logic:iterate, etc). This might be hard to do and still achieve
everything that displaytag does, but if I were really motivated, I'd
look at adapting displaytag to a model more like that...
Joe
At 22:59 -0400 9/19/03, David G Friedman wrote:
>Joe,
>
>I've been planning on using the displaytag library for that stuff when I get
>to it next week. Why won't the decorator classes work for you to perform
>summations of rows, groups, and so forth? I'm wondering why it won't work
>for you in case the same reasons might apply to my application....
>
>For reference, an example of the decorators for summations of groups and
>rows is here:
>http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/example-callbacks.jsp
>
>With their Java decorator class code example code here:
>http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/TotalWrapper.java.txt
--
--
Joe Germuska
Joe@Germuska.com
http://blog.germuska.com
"If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time."
--Jaron Lanier
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RE: [OT] Lightweight helper libraries for reporting?
Posted by David G Friedman <hu...@ix.netcom.com>.
Joe,
I've been planning on using the displaytag library for that stuff when I get
to it next week. Why won't the decorator classes work for you to perform
summations of rows, groups, and so forth? I'm wondering why it won't work
for you in case the same reasons might apply to my application....
For reference, an example of the decorators for summations of groups and
rows is here:
http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/example-callbacks.jsp
With their Java decorator class code example code here:
http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/TotalWrapper.java.txt
Regards,
David
-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Germuska [mailto:Joe@Germuska.com]
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 5:56 PM
To: Struts Users Mailing List
Subject: [OT] Lightweight helper libraries for reporting?
Does anyone know of any good libraries for collecting report data?
To be clear -- I'm not interested in a full-scale reporting library
like JasperReports. I've looked at it, and while it looks cool, I
have some specific requirements it doesn't serve. I've also looked
at the Display tag library, and while it has its good and bad opints,
it's basically not what I need.
What I'm looking for is something into which I can throw a bunch of
beans of a common type and then ask it to do things like grouping,
group totals, grand totals, and the like. Basically, the model of a
report data set, independent of how it is populated or how it would
be displayed.
Have you seen my library?
Thanks in advance,
Joe
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperreports/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/displaytag/
--
--
Joe Germuska
Joe@Germuska.com
http://blog.germuska.com
"If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time."
--Jaron Lanier
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