|
Informing Science + IT Education Conference 2003 Proceedings
| Informing Science + IT Education Conference |
| Pori, Finland June 24-27, 2003 |
| RepCom: A Customisable Report Generator Component System using XML-driven, Component- |
| based Development Approach |
| Leong Chee Hoong and and Lee Sai Peck |
| University of Malaya, Malaysia |
| University of Malaya, Malaysia |
| It is undeniable that report generation is one of the most important tasks in many companies regardless of the size |
| of the company. A good report generation mechanism can increase a company’s productivity in terms of effort |
| and time. This is more obvious in some startup companies, which normally use some in-house report generators. |
| Application development could be complex and thus software developers might require substantial efforts in |
| maintaining application program code. In addition, most of the report generators use a different kind of format to |
| store the report model. An application is no longer consid-ered an enterprise-level product if XML is not being |
| used elsewhere. This paper introduces a XML-driven and Component-based development approach to report |
| generation with the purpose of promoting portability, flexibility and genericity. In this approach, report layout is |
| specified using user-c344-defined XML elements together with queries that retrieve data from different databases. A |
| report is output as an HTML document, which can be viewed using an Internet browser. This paper presents the |
| approach us-ing an example and discusses the usage of the XML-driven report schema and how the proposed reus- |
| able report engine of a customisable report generator component system works to output an HTML re-port |
| format. The customisable report generator component system is implemented to support heteroge-neous database |
| Keywords: report model, report schema, report generator, XML, Component-based developmen |
ISSN
1535-07-03
Unless otherwise indicated, this paper has undergone blind external review by three or more reviewers.
Types of Papers: A Best Paper, Regular Paper, Short Paper, Informal Paper,
Unrefereed Panel Paper
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