Using XML in Reporting Systems
- Architecture of Reporting Systems
- When to Use XML with Reports
- Data Source for Reports
- ResultSet to XMLx
- Bringing It All Together
- The Sorting Table Stylesheet
- The Cross Tab Stylesheet
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
IN THIS CHAPTER
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Architecture of Reporting Systems
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When to Use XML with Reports
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Data Source for Reports
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ResultSet to XML
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Bringing It All Together
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The Sorting Table Stylesheet
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The Cross Tab Stylesheet
No matter what the Web application, or where it's implemented, it's a safe bet to assume that there will be some reporting involved. Even applications that don't have databases are likely to have some aspect of reporting. However, non-database systems are more likely to be looking at reports regarding numbers of page usage and data exclusive to system usage. The development of either of these reporting systems can benefit from the appropriate placement and usage of XML.
After creating a JSP that will fill the database with as much data as needed, JDOM and XSL will be used to create two reports. Before explaining those report components, we will explain a Java class that builds a JDOM XML representation from a database ResultSet.
Architecture of Reporting Systems
The different types of reporting systems that exist have to do most notably with the types of reports to create, and the structure of the entire system. The main types of reports are tables, cross tabs, and aggregate. Our first stylesheet will create a very generic table-creating stylesheet with dynamic sorting label links, while the second stylesheet will create a cross tab report from the same data source.
This brings us into the overall reporting system structure. The ideal system would have database-stored procedures perform the initial filtering and sorting of data, and have stylesheets that would each produce several reports. One stylesheet can produce multiple reports by using stylesheet parameters and changing filtering or sorting methods.
Even more ideally, these stylesheets would be created generically enough to be usable on multiple datasets. In this way, a very robust reporting system can be created quickly, after which the more specific, data-dependent reports can be created.
Another thing to consider when creating reporting systems has to do with security and access rights. Different people will be permitted to see only some reports, and it is important to incorporate a simple model to maintain this security. A common design is to have a database table that contains a record for each report. Then another table will have a record for each report and login type that has access to it. In this way, it is simple to change access rights to reports without having to touch the reporting pages themselves.
The reporting examples throughout this chapter and the next will use a database from which to create the JDOM documents that will be transformed with a generic stylesheet into our resulting HTML output page. We will glue these pieces together using a JSP to do the transformation and finally output the results. It is relatively simple to change the backend and create the JDOM document from another source.