The Essential Project Forum

Hi.
What is the common way to generate grafical Representations of the EA data!
For example Pie Diagrams, Gannt Charts or matrix kind of reports.
Commercial EAM Tools like TROUX offer sofisticated ways to generate diagrams using Frameworks like BIRT.
Is there.a BIRT plugin in essential project? How do companies use Essential for generating grafical Reports?
Thx
Wolfgang

For these sort of views there are a number of options.
The Viewer framework uses standard web technology, which means that you can use any charting / graphical web widgets that you might need.

We have used SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics and which is part of HTML 5) to render more 'custom' graphical views but more recently we are using a lot of 3rd-party (free) charting/graphical widgets and these provide the pie-charts, UML models etc. that we might need and are very easy and quick to use and look great.

We would be happy to help you get started with any graphical views that you might need.

Jonathan

Hi Wolfgang,

Just to build on Jon's answer a little more... You could use BIRT, though we don't currently.

For some of our client work, we've used the following tools and they're straightforward to implement. We're using some of these in the release

http://thejit.org/
http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/
http://www.simile-widgets.org/
http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/servlet.html

The tricky bit, as with BIRT too, is customising the look and feel for your needs, but get the data visualised isn't hard. Pie charts and bar graphs are particularly easy as they're often based on the "count" of a particular object e.g. the percentage of Applications that are hosted vs on site vs SaaS. XSL, the language used to develop reports, make this kind of maths very easy. That said, we very rarely get asked for these kind of views. Though they look great, but perhaps lend themselves better to faster changing datasets than EA.

http://www.jqplot.com

This seems to be quite a nice looking library, though I've not implemented this yet.

Though, in theory, you could develop reports in commercial tools yourself, in my experience, this rarely happens as there's often quite a bit of proprietary knowledge required. I've personally have experience of building reports for commercial EA tools and can reassure you that developing for Essential is much more straightforward and easier to pick up.

Hopefully, by taking a standards based approach, like we do in Essential, you can build any reports (graphical or otherwise) yourself quite quickly. You just need some basic HTML,CSS and XSL knowledge and of course, we're always here to help you in any way we can.

jonathan.carter wrote:For these sort of views there are a number of options.
The Viewer framework uses standard web technology, which means that you can use any charting / graphical web widgets that you might need.

We have used SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics and which is part of HTML 5) to render more 'custom' graphical views but more recently we are using a lot of 3rd-party (free) charting/graphical widgets and these provide the pie-charts, UML models etc. that we might need and are very easy and quick to use and look great.

We would be happy to help you get started with any graphical views that you might need.

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan

thanks a lot for your reply.
Where can I find open source examples for those reports?
I would have expected in an open source tool that there are plenty of examples on your web page.

Greetings from quite foggy Vienna
Wolfgang

Greetings to you Wolfgang!

Examples of these will be available for download soon. We're in the process of packaging up the next release of the Essential Viewer and views like these will be included.

In the meantime, I'll try to get some examples posted in the Community / Share part of the site.

Jonathan