brainstorm: February 2015

Thursday, February 19, 2015

NextReports Server: Capture dashboard as PDF

NextReports 8.0 will allow users to capture a dashboard as PDF. PDF file will contain a single landscape page with the visible part of the dashboard. This means all content which is not visible, because a scroll is involved won't be captured.

Users has a small number of tricks to make the dashboard full-visible:

- NextReports Server has a button to hide dashboards explorer
- Browser F11 button makes it to be visible in full screen
- CTRL+mouse wheel will allow to zoom-in/zoom-out the browser content

Using the tricks above we make a dashboard like the following to be fully visible:

PDF capture will generate a file which contains the dashboard name and a footer with generation date:

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

NextReports: Copy Destination

NextReports 8.0 will allow to define a 'Copy' destination type when a report is run / scheduled. This means a new report with user defined name will be created as a copy of the generated one. Because generated files have an unique name made of report name followed by a random UUID, it may be necessary sometimes to have a known name in order to access the file from an external application.

All existing destinations will have a new 'Changed file name' property which is optional. If user specifies another name for the report, then a file copy will be generated as well, that copy will be distributed to the destination and then the copy file will be removed. For 'Mail' destination this property has meaning only if the report is sent as attachment.

Friday, February 06, 2015

NextReports Server: ETL for Analysis

NextReports 8.0 version will bring something new in the way server can interact with data.

ETL (Extract Transform Load) process can be defined when any report is run or scheduled. ETL is practically selected in run formats list. After run, all data is brought locally to NextReports Server machine inside a OrientDB NOSQL database.

User will be notified when the process starts and when the process ends through NextReports Server messages.

Saved data can be used by a new Analysis feature, which allows any user with necessary rights to play with data.

About Me

Mihai Dinca-Panaitescu

Working with Java since 1998 with focus on both server back-end and UI.

In the late 90's till 2003 when not so much frameworks were present I was involved in proprietary server implementation (with all the technology from that time like RMI, JDBC, transactions, Servlets, XML, XSL), user interface with SWING and a lot of algorithms for agriculture business.

In middle 2000's I was involved in many custom development projects adding more flavor to my knowledge : JBoss and OC4J servers, J2EE, Hibernate, EHCache, Ant, JUnit, TestNG

From 2008 I was part of NextReports, starting with designer development in SWING. Then NextReports Server came to life and new technologies were adopted : Spring, JPA, JCR, Wicket, jQuery, Jersey, Maven, Ivy, Git, Android.

Since starting of 2014 I developed a HTML5 library called NextCharts which can be found on github.

I’m currently part of the NextReports developing team at Advantage Software Factory, a local leading provider of business software solutions. NextReports is a business reporting suite composed of reports designer, reporting engine and reporting server. Besides this product, ASF also developed a debt collection software and a CRM solution.