Good resources for learning how to develop reports

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jimphelps
Posts: 7
Joined: 24 Mar 2009, 20:20

I've been looking for good resources on developing interesting reports from Protege. I know of this reporting tutorial:

http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/ ... ew-reports

I'm looking for information on the creation of the XSL files, generating graphics from the meta-model and plugins that might help.

Thanks,

Jim
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi Jim,

Yes, that tutorial article is focussed on how to introduce a report that you've generated into the Essential Viewer (and not how to make the report in the first place).

Have a look at Jason's forum posting about how to go about creating a new report. We'll make this into a tutorial. There's actually a simpler way of viewing the slots on a class by using the orange magnifying glass icon in the class browser (far left) on the Instances Tab. This pops up a window containing all the information about the class and its slots.

As he mentions, I would recommend taking a copy of a relevant XSL from the Essential Viewer package as a starting point and modify it to pull out the information that you need. You will need some familiarity with XSL (although by no means do you need to be an expert) but we've found this to be a very productive way of putting together new reports. A good XSL editor such as Oxygen or XMLSpy will help a lot. We've created sub-templates for handling things like the header and footer of all the HTML reports etc. that you'll see being used in the example.

For graphical reports, we've used SVG as this is quite easily authored using the XSL and enables things like hyperlinks on the graphical objects. We have a simple pattern for such reports that uses 2 linked XSLs (1 for the report page that includes an embedded SVG object that is generated by a second XSL defined in the URL of the object). For a simple example of this approach, have a look at the Deployed Operating System report in Essential Viewer (in Tomcat)
core_tech_opsys_summary.xsl
and
core_tech_opsys_summary_graphic.xsl
in
{Tomcat}/webapps/essential_viewer/WebContent/technology/
We have also another more complex SVG pattern that involves intermediary XML formats and JSPs but we can cover that if/when you need it.
We've looked into using things like charting widgets but to date, we haven't used them in the supplied reports - but as the XSL is mostly rendering HTML, it is easy to incorporate those sorts of things.

Finally, within Protege, I've always like the Jambalaya tab which provides an interactive SVG control for defining reports and navigating the model.

Hope this gets you started - but please do let us know if there are any specific things that you'd like to do and need some help.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

We've just published a more detailed article describing how to write your own reports. There's more to come in this article but I thought it was worth getting the basics out there as soon as possible.

Creating New Reports

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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