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Designing an open, standards-based reporting system: XML meets the challenges and design goals of a business reporting system.

Article Excerpt
As XML has grown more prevalent as a data delivery mechanism, so too has the need to use it for presentation in a wide variety of reporting formats. XML is useful for more than just the delivery of information, however. It can be used to help solve a wide range of problems encountered when designing a business data reporting solution, from specifying the layout of the reports themselves to controlling where the data used in the report comes from.

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At Panscopic, we develop an enterprise-class data reporting and analytics product that consists of two main elements: the Panscopic Scope Server, which takes report definition files and executes them to produce finished output, and the Scope Creation Suite, a set of client-side authoring tools that create the report definitions that the server executes (reports are called "Scopes" in Panscopic's parlance). Some of the challenges and design goals that we faced when designing the product architecture were:

* Report definitions needed to be in a form, preferably text-based, that was familiar to developers and could be edited outside of our tools if necessary.

* The report definition syntax needed to maintain a clear separation between the report data content and its presentation, and promote tire reuse of basic report objects such as queries, layouts, and parameters.

* The system had to be extensible, so that new data sources, layout components, etc., could be introduced over time...