telephone:InetSoft Product Information: Database Reports
This is a table of contents of useful product information about InetSoft's reporting software. Ease of deployment and ease of use are the cornerstones of our product development strategy. Read articles below for more details.
Balanced Scorecard for Reports - InetSoft's reporting software comes equipped with balanced scorecards for reports that can be set up to provide critical up to the minute updates as often as needed. A scorecard is used to keep track of certain parameters (e.g., Sales Revenue). Multiple users can monitor these parameters from the Report Portal. These parameters (metrics) can also be measured at regular intervals (triggers). They can be checked against certain conditions (thresholds, time comparisons, custom business logic etc.) to which they must comply. If they don't, specified actions can be automatically taken (email notifications, etc.). The metric, trigger, conditions and other settings are collectively handled as a target. A scorecard is thus a collection of one or more targets. Consider the following use of a scorecard: A company aims for a 2% increase in sales revenue every month. A sales manager wishes to closely monitor this metric to ensure a sustained increase in the revenue. We create a data asset (in the Asset Composer) which calculates the total sales revenue of the company for each month. We create a metric based on the 'Revenue' field of this asset...
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Banded Reports - Rewound Property - The “rewound” property has special significance in Section scripting. When a Section is printed on a page, the bands are repeated for each row of the table. If a band goes outside of the boundary of the page, the band. Normally this does not cause a problem, because when the band is rewound, it does not re-execute any associated scripts. The only time this is an issue is when the calculation of elements in a band is used in the page header and footer. For example, if a script is attached to an element in the band for calculating a running total on the page, the total would contain an extra value from the next page. To correct this problem, you need to handle rewinding for scripts in the onPageBreak handler. First, check if the rewound property is set. If it is, the script undoes the effect of the previous script and pushes the value to the next page. The onPrint handler is executed before a report is printed or exported. The typical usages of onPrint handlers are as follows...
Best Practices for Report Distribution - Let's go ahead and move into the next slide. This next section is involved with recommendations for good report formatting. Now some may say that formatting comes a little bit later on in the process, but as I discussed earlier, for me, knowing the format in which the stakeholder desires is going to be key in your development of this report. Ensuring that the report is structured for easy reading is going to be an important objective for the report or for the business analyst. The report should be structured so that useful information can be read easily at a glance. The report should then allow users to easily access more detailed information. So as I said earlier, providing any executive summaries at the beginning of the report is going to be useful. Completeness is key, ensuring that the report is complete so the user doesn’t have to go elsewhere to find more information. So there is this tradeoff that occurs between being complete and having too much. We will talk about that later on in this presentation...
Best Practices for Reporting - I would like to welcome you to today’s webinar titled ‘Best Practices for Reporting.’ It will last approximately 60 minutes including a Q&A session. So make sure to submit your questions in advance using the questions feature of the webinar software. It's a pleasure to speak to you folks in the business analyst community. What I have done for this presentation is did a little bit of research, little bit of surveying in the business analyst field to determine some best practices, perhaps best practices that can be incorporated into your workflows particularly during the times where you need to gather requirements and move your way into the workflow of developing reports for those constituents. This presentation, as mentioned, will last about an hour. Let me go ahead and give you an agenda. What we will do first is we will walk through some best practices. I will talk you through what I feel are best practices in the different stages of the reporting lifecycle. What we will then do is move into talking about some challenges. I actually have a polling question for you about 60% through this webinar so look forward to that...
Browse Reports From a Web Browser - InetSoft provides a viewer to browse reports from a web browser: the User Portal. The User Portal is based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It can be used with Firefox 2.x and later, Netscape 6.x and later, and Internet Explorer 6.x and later. The User Portal is different from the previewer provided by the Report Designer. A previewer's primary function is to preview a report before it is printed. It has functions to zoom and print a report. On the other hand, the viewer is designed from the ground up to browse interactive reports. In addition to displaying the contents of a report, it also handles the rich set of user interactions supported by the replet environment and provides advanced searching and navigation functions. We will cover the use of the viewer in this chapter. Note that the differences in browsers have little effect on the report developer. The User Portal is a combination of JavaScript code and dynamically generated DHTML from the ServletRepository. The ServletRepository is the only servlet that handles all User Portal related requests. It must be registered with a servlet container. Refer to the Administration Reference for more information regarding servlet setup and configuration...
Building a Custom Report Tree - A custom representation of the report repository (list of deployed reports) for a given user can be created using a JSP page or servlet. It is assumed that the user has been signed-on into the reporting server with a valid session. To make certain API calls, it is necessary to obtain the repository list for the given user. The resulting code will display a list of reports for which the user and/or his roles have read permissions. It is often desirable to set certain custom properties for a user session. These properties are external to Style Intelligence, but may be accessed within the Style Intelligence environment. You can also change certain Style Intelligence-specific session properties on the fly. Although properties can be set through the HttpSession object, it is highly recommended that you access properties using the SRPrincipal object associated with the user session. You can access the SRPrincipal object from within the script of a report as well as from a VPM...
Built-in Interactivity for Dashboards & Reports - The Designer provides the embedded Script implementation of all the methods discussed in this section. It is better to use the Designer to specify links and interactions, only using the API described below if the desired feature cannot be implemented from the visual interface. The BasicReplet API defines a number of methods for adding common user interactions to a replet. Each call to these methods causes some default event handlers to be registered in order to support that interaction. They serve as convenience functions as well as high-level encapsulations of the functionality. For most replets, the high-level methods are enough to handle most user interaction needs and programmers do not need to work with the lower level event handling API. There are three varieties of this method for adding a link to another element or report: 1. addLink(String eid, String replet) Add a hyperlink from the specified element (element ID) to a replet. When the element is clicked, the target replet is opened in a new window. 2. addLink(String eid, EventPoint item, String replet, RepletRequest req...
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Business Reporting Software - Warum ist InetSoft's Reporting Lösung einfach, agil und robust? Style Intelligence™ ist InetSoft's Flaggschiff Business Intelligence Platform. Die Dashboard-, Reporting- und Data Mashup-Lösungen sind: Einfach - Geniessen Sie eine ungewöhnlich schnelle Implementierung mit einem Minimum an Aufwand von IT Experten. Erfahren Sie als Business Anwender eine schnelle und flache Lernkurve, die nur Excel ähnliche Kenntnisse erfordert. Einfache Anwendung für Analysten und Administratoren, es sind keine SQL Kenntnisse erforderlich...
Calculating the Page Total - Calculating the page total itself is very simple. First declare two report-level variables in the onLoad Handler, total1 and total2. These will be used to store the totals. Next, add a script to the total field (Text) in the Content band to add the total value to the two total variables, and to display the appropriate highlighting. Finally, add an onPageBreak Handler script to display the two totals in the footer, and to reset the total variables. One complication of page-level calculation is the fact that a band can be rewound to a new page during printing. Therefore, if you leave the report as it currently is, the page total may contain an extra value from the next page. To address this, you will add logic to handle the rewinding of a band. To “undo” the effect of rewinding, you first need to determine what the last band did before it was rewound. In the onPageBreak Handler handler, you can check if the last band was rewound, and undo the last action. For this example, declare a report-level variable in the onLoad Handler to hold the last value added to the total variables...
Client-side Report Event Handling - Client-side event handling is implemented through the EventHandler class. An EventHandler object is an event to command mapping. It contains pairs of events and command objects. The event object in each pair serves as an event specification. When the EventHandler is asked to handle an event, the event is matched against the event specification. If a positive match is found, the corresponding command is returned as the result of the event processing. EventHandler uses a fuzzy match algorithm. Event specifications contain partial descriptions of events. The specification is compared to a concrete event object by ignoring the parts that are not specified. In general, to omit a value in an event specification, use null as the object (String, EventPoint, etc.) value and –1 for integers. Add a menu event to command mapping. The menu event can be specified for either the entire page, or a specific element/item. Add a hyperlink from a form to a replet. When a form with the specified name is submitted, the form data is packaged into a request and used to create a new replet object of the specified replet...
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