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« BrOffice.org | Main | New: OOo-Dev 2.3... »
Thursday, 19 Apr 2007
Report Designer will extend the Database Application
Ocke Janssen

Moin GullFOSS reader,

Since this is my first blog entry, I'd like to give you a short introduction to myself. My name is Ocke Janssen. I mainly develop in the database area for about 9 years now.. Taking a look at my e-mail address, you can easily see that I'm an employee of Sun Microsystems Inc..and co-lead of the OpenOffice.org Base project.

Back to our database application and your daily work with it; I'd like to invite you to file any bugs or topics you consider to be improved. Please send me an issue, I'll try to do my best to enhance your satisfaction with the product.

Another topic I'd like to talk to you about is that I'm working on a new project for some time, namely the ”Report Designer”. A long missing feature which was asked for by the OpenOffice.org community very often. We first had to find a good reporting engine to use, which we found in Pentaho's reporting engine, formerly known as JfreeReport.

So, what is it all about?

The new report designer will extend the database application. You then have the possibility to create reports not only with the famous wizard, but also manually.

As output format you have the choice between text documents or spreadsheets. (OASIS Open Document Format). The designer uses the classical way of presenting reports. To navigate through the components of your report, you'll have a navigator as you for sure already know from forms.

Each repeating section of the report has its own area where text can be inserted. In the first release you'll be able to create groups (with header and footer), functions, page header/footer, report header/footer. The best way to find all features is to try it when a stable version is available;-)

For the impatient ones of you, here are some first screen shots:

 

and a part of the resulting document when executing it.


The development is not yet finished but we will put a developer snapshot on the net as soon as possible.

In this context, I'd like to mention that my and other Sun engineer's work goes in the development of the designer - not the underlying engine. Many thanks to Thomas Morgner (“Thanks Thomas”) and the whole Pentaho team/community for providing us this fantastic reporting engine.

If you are Java programmer, you may want to dive into the sources of this engine. Makes fun, I did it my own :-)

Some (in the first step) supported features are:

That's it for today. Stay tuned for more information from the database team. dba.openoffice.org

tags:

Posted by Ocke Janssen on 19 Apr 2007  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to del.icio.us Bookmark to del.icio.us |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[20]

Comments:

This sounds like a excellent idea. As a newbie to ubuntu will it be easy to add it to my package? Regards Ken

Posted by Ken Graham on April 19, 2007 at 07:35 PM CEST #

Congratulations on your work.

I like and use both systems, and is great news that you folks are working together.

I'll follow your news and hope that the project gains greater steam.

Best regards,
--
MeTheGeek

Posted by MeTheGeek on April 19, 2007 at 09:30 PM CEST #

Very good idea! And thanks for all the hard work. A suggestion: how about getting some accountants together and develop an accounting package on top of OOBase? It could be the "killer app" for OO.o and would be very useful. I am neither a programmer nor an accountant, so I cannot help there. However, I would be happy to help out testing such a system as an ordinary businessman. Keep up the good work!

Posted by penguin007 on April 20, 2007 at 02:21 AM CEST #

It's a very interesting development and new next feature of OpenOffice.org. I look forward to have the result and persuade to the company I work to use and optimize more with this result either of using StarOffice or OpenOffice.org. Congrats & success!

Posted by Prianggada I Tanaya on April 20, 2007 at 02:58 AM CEST #

An excellent idea. Thanks for your work. I hope that it may be easy to add to my Mandrake. Bye & success!

Posted by constantin on April 20, 2007 at 10:15 AM CEST #

Been. Waiting. For. It. For. Too. Long. Great.

Posted by dot tilde dot on April 20, 2007 at 11:36 AM CEST #

It's very good tool. I think it is excellent for science and shool! Bye & success!

Posted by Franz-Josef on April 20, 2007 at 02:15 PM CEST #

This is excellent news which shows great promise for the OO/SO Base project. Right now the use of Base is very limited. You can create your database and enter the data but you cannot get a properly formatted report out. In particular it is heard, if at all possible, to get a report with nested grouping out and the controls for formatting the report are extremely limited. Once the report designer is available then it becomes a lot easier for users with limited application development experience to use Base. I will be looking forward to hearing when it becomes available and I already have a couple of projects in mind to use it for, but right now the limitations prevent me from doing so.
Thank you for sharing this news with us and keep up the good work.
OzOle

A suggestion: I like the use of colours to denote headers and footers, however, I would suggest that using the same colours for Report Header and Report Footer and likewise for Page Header and Page Footer would make it visually easier to see the layout.

Note to Penguin007: What you are asking for is the sort of thing you and I as users of the system should be doing. Ocke and his colleages are concerned with providing the tools to make it possible for users to develop what you suggest. However, your suggestion is excellent. Perhaps the OpenOffice team could provide a repository for such applications where we all could upload our work for others to share.

Posted by OzOle on April 20, 2007 at 10:18 PM CEST #

This sounds really interesting, I'm looking forward to seeing this appear as I reckon this could be yet another fillip in the cap of this capable application!

Good luck folks..

Posted by Chris Samuel on April 21, 2007 at 01:44 PM CEST #

I too am excited by this announcement. I agree with Penguin007 that an accounting-type stream would be helpful for us business owners. Especially since there is only one (that I know of) software package that I can use for Canadian accounting on a Macintosh. And its price is prohibitive to the small business owner. Only good can come of this venture.

Posted by drekker on April 22, 2007 at 02:50 AM CEST #

This is great news to see the new report designer! Is there a similar project for a form designer that does not run in Writer?

Posted by Michel Larocque on April 23, 2007 at 08:22 PM CEST #

Does the report only do "report" as in the screenshot? I noticed that http://www.pentaho.com/products/reporting/ shows different reporting format, such as graph, inclusion of external file/image, and export to pdf. Are these features ported into OOo? How about macro? Thanks for your great effort.

Posted by honfui on April 24, 2007 at 01:28 AM CEST #

Finally something promising about OoBase! I hope you will find similar solution for forms, too, as current Oo Base forms in Writer make me nervous:). Also, I hope you will enhance better import of MS Access tables and queries into embedded HSQL. Linked tables (in order to be able to work with different data-sources simultenously) are very needed, too. I'm looking forward for further improvements. Regards, Zlatko

Posted by Zlatko Matić on April 24, 2007 at 04:12 PM CEST #

I'm delighted to see that OLAP will turn up as a capability in Base. I keep hoping to see another advanced database technology turn up here too--the multi-valued approach to database design. Is there any prospect of that turning up in OOBase one day? For those that haven't experienced it, a multi-valued database allows a potentially repetitive field--say telephone numbers, which can have multiple instances--to be stored within a single file/table as a "multi-valued field". The standard SQL approach to this requires two tables: one for the unique person information, and one for telephone numbers where each row/record contains the unique person identifier and one telephone number for that person. Displaying that information then requires a join operation. The usual quick and dirty way around SQL's limitations is to make up multiple telephone fields, one for each type of phone. But that goes against the purity of the Cobb "normalised" database definition; and it forces you to search three fields to find a person if all you remember is that one of his/her telephone numbers included the string "1234". But more importantly, this need to separate data into multiple tables is a large part of why proper relational database design is so complex. The multi-valued approach abolishes most of that complexity in one swoop--without destroying the capacity to store information in only one place. The best ever commercial implementation of this was the DOS program Advanced Revelation, but it suffered in the transition to Windows (as Open Insight) and never quite recovered. There's an opportunity there for the Open Source movement to design a product that makes database design easy for the masses.

Posted by Steve Keen on April 24, 2007 at 10:58 PM CEST #

Well, I really wish you can handle this, as starting this development, it is a promise on forthgoing/coming usability of OO.o in business, not only for the take-out and presentation of data but for a reliable input and datamangement within OO.o-base aswell. Hope you will not try to make the killerapplication out of this, but take it small, take it serious, make it working from the very beginning, and get enough time from your employer to do so. Martin

Posted by mhonline on April 25, 2007 at 03:34 PM CEST #

Will `Report Designer' support vertical writing (right from left) report? Though it seems the Open Office is able to create document in vertical layout (also right from left), does it mean the report will automatically support this feature as well? So far as I know, some people (vendors) who want to switch to Open Office, however, lack of this feature prevents them from migrating to open source software. It is a bit pity.

Posted by newbie on April 27, 2007 at 12:33 PM CEST #

This is a most welcome development. It will definitely improve the usefulness of Base for business users. I have used Application System for 10 years and have been looking for something like this for another 10 years. This is getting close.

Posted by Jean-Victor Côté on April 30, 2007 at 08:03 PM CEST #

Shows great promise! We have been waiting for a very long time now for this development on Oobase and finally we are looking forward to OObase features and capability surpassing that of Lotus Approach database both in speed and functionality. Congratulations in advance and we are looking forward to OpenOffice.org becoming the premiere office suite solution!

Posted by Al-Ransted E. Lagarde on May 02, 2007 at 12:31 PM CEST #

Congratulations on your accomplishments thus far, and thank you to you, your team and to Sun et. al. for undertaking this effort. As one who cut his teeth on CP/M, I am pleased to see the community spirit of the earlier days is still vital. I have been watching the growth of Open Office for six or seven years now, and am continually impressed with the talent, intelligence and enthusiasm of the open source community, of which Open Office is a shining example. Keep up the good work. The development of a report generator is an important enhancement. For me, development of the core functionality is a more important objective than the development of applications, such as accounting packages. I also think that SQL-based relational database architecture, even with its structural and performance limitations, is quite likely to be a key technology for the next decade, at least, and therefore is a proper foundation for OO's Base, assuming as I do that the object of the OO project is, essentially, inter-office inter-operability.

Posted by Charles Hudson on May 02, 2007 at 08:32 PM CEST #

I think a report disigning should consist a Group Header and Group Footer with capability to filter data.

Posted by Madhab Chandra Basak on May 13, 2007 at 07:22 AM CEST #

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