Re: [sahana-maindev] Generating reports in Sahana

[<rav...@op...>]

>
> Sanjeewa - so you are talking about generating report
> formats and not exporting data?  Ok - then you can
> discount the input on data protection and policies.

Hi

I think the mail sudheera sent to the sahana-dev(and later forwarded to
humanitarian-ict list)explains it all.

i have added some comments here and reply all to send to both the lists.

<sudheera>
according to the discussion I had with Sanjeewa J., on the reporting
module, it's actually going to be a set of Sahana libraries that will
help the module developers when creating reports, displaying them and
generating various types of outputs (xhtml, pdf, ODF etc..) of those
reports for their modules. So the types of reports that's going to be
generated are up to the module developers.
<ravindra>
Therefore this library is identical to the library that generates text
boxes,select boxes. But instead of those functions Reporting library will
contains functions that will generate graphs ,charts ,ect given an
associative array.

<sudheera>
After the development of the libraries, A reporting module will be
created to aggregate all the public reports (only if the module
developer make them available) from the modules so the users can find
those on a single place. This is done by automatically picking up
reports from the module directories (may be using reports.inc...) and
listing them in the reporting module.
<ravindra>
very good architecture! and consistent with the admin module that follows
the same approach

<sudheera>

Some suggestions,

* It would be good to think about a caching mechanism because the report
generation might be quite resource hungry and would not be a good idea
to generate reports each time the server gets a request.
<ravindra>
very good point!
<sudheera>
* If we can get some report searching functionality, may be using some
kind of meta data (set by the person who created the report), would also
add to the value of the reporting module.
<ravindra>
This is a very good idea sudheera has brought up.
when we create the reports ,there are two parts
1. META data about the report
2. Data contained in the report

we have privacy concerns over the data ,and therefore the 2nd part
exclusively belongs to the respective module and no access is given to th=
e
reportng module.
But its fine for the reporting module to access the meta data and provide
a search facility.
I am for this idea given by sudheera


>
> Does mySQL come with any report generation tools?
Sanjeewa has two parts in his project
1. providing an API for the module developers to generate
reports
2. find a way to generate PDF,CALC,ect from the data given through
the API.
There are FOSS libraries that do that !
sanjeewa please write about the tools you found in your research!
and we were thinking about an XML inermediate format.
So data -> XML-> PDF.
But its time consuming as we have to define the schema,DTD
for this intermediate format. so as sudheera mentioned its wise
to start of with direct conversion from data -> PDF and
then with experience start writing the XML inermediate format.

cheers

ravindra