Not all reporting tools support inter-row calculations directly. When they don’t, you need to write scripts to implement them, which is really a big hassle, even bigger when multilayer data grouping is involved. esProc can deal with this situation thanks to its support for order-related calculations. An esProc script c...
2015-08-24 1281 0
0
There are many knotty problems around report development. These include complex layout, which is difficult to build with a reporting tool alone; complex data sources requiring dynamic access and involving different types of databases or non-database data; as well as the handling of order-related computation, subsets of...
2015-08-18 1512 0
0
It is difficult to produce unusual report layouts automatically with functionalities provided by reporting tools. But if we can prepare data sources in an appropriate way, the difficulty of building such a report will be significantly reduced.
To do that, we can use esProc (its free edition is available). It not only s...
2015-08-12 1615 0
0
With class library for merely simple parsing jobs, Java and reporting tools have difficulty in handling in-depth processing of semi-structured JSON data. esProc can help reduce the difficulty. A reporting tool will execute an esProc script in the same way as it executes a database stored procedure, pass parameters to t...
2015-08-06 1505 0
0
esProc has lots of functions for processing structured and semi-structured data, as well as supports parsing expressions dynamically and using heterogeneous data sources. A reporting tool can pass in parameters, execute an esProc script the same way as it executes a database stored procedure and gets the result set thr...
2015-08-05 2645 0
0
In addition to conventional databases, data sources of a reporting tool could also involve JSON files, MongoDB, txt files, Excel and HDFS files. Normally reporting tools can handle a single data source, but they are unable to manage various data sources requiring consolidation. Even though the data sources are of the s...
2015-06-29 1512 0
0
Sometimes you need to reference data sources dynamically through a parameter, merge data sources into one, or dynamically pass data source name to a subreport/Table control. Often reporting tools – especially those with support for single data source, such as BIRT and Jasper – have to use a high-level language to...
2015-06-18 4312 0
1
It’s hard to create reports with unconventional layouts directly with functions provided by a reporting tool. However, if the data for building such a report can be beautifully prepared, the difficulty could be considerably reduced.
esProc(free edition is available) is an expert at handling this data preparation. It pr...
2015-06-15 1488 0
0
It’s difficult to handle unconventional statistical tasks using simply the reporting tool, like Jasper or BIRT, or SQL. One of the cases is that the source data don’t meet the crosstab’s requirements and thus need to be transposed for display. Having powerful computing engine to process structured data and being integr...
2015-02-09 1269 0
0
Functionally, reporting tools like Jasper Report or BIRT can handle the situation where the master report and the subreport(or the table) have their data sources in different databases. But data source names cannot be used directly in the subreport, instead they need to be defined in clear-text database usernames and p...
2015-01-27 1514 0
0
Multiple datasources are very common in report development. We would first join tables from different databases before performing subsequent computations, such as filtering, grouping and sorting. With virtual data source or table join, reporting tools like JasperReport and BIRT can in some degree realize these computat...
2015-01-22 1270 0
0
