Welcome to BTech 450 project site!
14-Mar-2007 I went to Kiwiplan at 2:00pm, talked to Gareth, Tim and Kenji, about the details of the project. I kind of got the idea, however, it is still quite vague. Gareth is going send me some concrete examples by the end of this week. I hope that can get me more ideas. He also suggested me to play with some standard reporting tools, e.g. Jasper Reports, Datavision. I am going to do that probably tomorrow.
14-Mar-2007 After back from Kiwiplan, I spent about 6 hours developing this website, I am hoping this website is nice-looking and easy to follow.
1-Apr-2007 I spent a couples of week time looking at the JasperReport (and iReport which used to design jasper report), I got the basic idea of jasper report. I now need to integrate the facilities of those into my propsed system, basically, power user needs to click one buttom and launch iReport and start designing the report using the data source that I am supposed to produce...
5-Apr-2007 Gareth suggested me to look at how jasper uses multiple data source to produce sub-report. He aslo wants me to look at how to implement the JRDataSource in order to produce my custom data source.
5-Apr-2007 By the way, I have set up the computer and desk today in Kiwiplan...
15-Apr-2007 Build a relatively simple GUI, just to shows the basic use cases, I have build the GUI quite robust and quite "OO" (i.e. I hope they are reusable) as I know many changes need to be made later on...
26-Apr-2007 Currently investigate how to integrate iReport into the system, so that after users approve the underlying data source, iReport is launched with the FlexibleTable(s) configured as the data source. To do that I need to read through the source code for iReport, and figure out what they trying to do... The code is largely UNCOMMENTED, which makes it very very hard to understand, I am currently (trying to) making a IReportUtils class, to do various things.
10-Aug-2007 I am now in the stage of making the user experience as easier as possible. I plan to make the linking between master and sub report happen automatically, all the user needs to do is to specify which two attributes from 2 data sources are linked.(I also tend to do that in GUI where they can draw a line to connect the linking attributes). Also, all the parameter passing should happen automatically as well
6-Sep-2007 I decided to make user specify links using a Wizard instead of drawing lines. In the wizard, user can specify master data source, fields for master and sub report to display and the links
25-Sep-2007 It was quite a hard work to make the parameters passing, data source definition etc automatically. But now, it was pretty much done. I wrote a few sub classes of the original iReport to make that possible
8-Oct-2007 Implementation nearly finishes, now plan to prepare presentation and report.