NextReports Server: Data Migration

NextReports Server 6.1 will bring a new feature: data migration. Practically, a new section, visible only by administrators, is added.

From this section, administrator can export or import data. For data export we must select some entities like data sources, reports, charts and dashboards. The result will be a migration.xml file. There is no need to know which entities are used (referenced) by selected entities. All referenced entities will be automatically exported. Take a look at the following image:

We see that dashboard contains widgets. Widget contains a report or a chart. Report / Chart contains a data source and optionally links through drill-down to other reports or charts. So, by exporting a single dashboard, all entities that are involved will be exported too.

Any migration file can be used by an import process. When import is launched, a backup zip file of the entire repository is done. Any imported entity which has an id found inside repository will be updated. If id is not found, a new entity is created, taking care of name collision.

Migration process must not interfere with repository modification. Because of that, NextReports Server will show a maintenance page when export or import is running:

Use NextReports for Information

When people think about reports they see almost every time analysis documents which aggregate their needed data in various formats. But reports can be anything else like simple information sheets. You can use data just to find answers to any domain you are interested in.

For example using a simple csv file with countries data we can find out needed information from a specific country like country code, phone code, capital, internet country code, currency and so on.

Query is done very easy with drag-and-drop designer's features. A Country parameter will allow to select information just for it:

A simple report will show us what information we are interested in:

Run it for desired countries and you are done.

This is just an example, but you can think at any csv data you can obtain live from the web (forecast, financial data). A simple (scheduled) process to get your csv file from web to a local storage is needed if you want up-to-date data. By comparing to saving to a regular database, such process does not need any programming!

NextReports Server: Settings per User

NextReports Server dashboards can contain any number and type of widgets like charts, tables, alarms, indicators, pivots. Any widget has a number of settings:

• internal settings like refresh time, timeout, type (for charts)
• parameters values

These settings can be modified and the state of widgets is changed for all users that have the right to see them.

Starting with 6.1 version a change will be done in the way these settings are kept.

If a user has write permission to a dashboard (dashboard was created by user or dashboard was shared to user with write permission) then these settings are stored globally and by changing them the global values are affected.

If a user has just read permission to a dashboard, user can still change the settings (in previous versions was not possible). In this case, the values for settings are kept just for the specific user. In this way it is possible for every user to have different settings for the same widget without altering the global values.

NextReports Server: Create your color theme

Starting from 6.1 version users can add their color theme to NextReports Server.

Color theme file must be named like theme-<color>.properties and must be added where the existing themes reside: webapps/nextserver/WEB-INF/classes/com/asf/nextserver/web/themes

All i18n files must contain a new property called:   Settings.personalize.theme.theme-<color>=<name of theme>

These color themes just change some foregrounds and backgrounds to make NextReports Server having the same chromatic as you desire.

There are also two images that are taken into account.

First is the actions image which is used in popups to decorate the actions menu and which you can define in theme files:

actions-image=actions-col-arrow-green.gif

Second image is the Ok  image used inside table columns when everything is as should be. This is not defined inside theme files. You just make sure that an image with name tick_<name of theme>.png exists inside images folder, otherwise the default is used.

NextReports: Get data from text files

NextReports 6.1 will allow to create a data source for CSV files. Using a CSV JDBC driver , users will be able to create reports and charts simply by providing data inside a csv file. Data source url contains the directory path where csv files are found:

There are some special properties which can be edited using driver properties:

You are not restricted to csv files, you can use any text file in which data is separated through a special separator. Csv file may contain the columns names on the first row, but generally those names should be specified in driver properties. Here user can also define the types for columns choosing between Int, String, Double, Boolean and Date.

Lets say, as a simple example, we have a simple csv file like the following with balance accounts for some persons:

1,mike,100
2,john,215
3,stevens,175
4,ann,89
5,dean,300
6,,

When we connect to the CSV data source we will see the csv files from that folder as tables and we can use them to create a report just like with any database data. The only restriction is that a query must be done on a single csv file. We cannot make joins between such tables.

We could make a simple report to compute the sum of balances:

We can also see that empty fields are correctly interpreted depending on the defined types: