Tops Report Definition Language

Multi-Nested Roll-Up Report Markup Language Proposal

I've done enough "multi-nested" reports with totals and subtotals with both row-wise and column-wise groupings, totals, averages, etc. that it feels like there should be a tool to make building and formatting such reports easier. The banded approach is no longer sufficient.

This is a rough attempt to explore a potential "report markup language" for such reports.

Here is a general example:

 <datasource file="myFile.csv" filetype="CSV">
 <row field="field_2" span="yes" align="center">
 ...Field 2 Title
 ...<row field="field_3">
 ......Field 3 Title
 ......<column list="2006,2007,2008" span="yes">
 .........<column field="field_4" onNull="N/A">
 .........Field 4 Title
 .........</column>
 .........<sum>Sub-Total</sum>
 .........<average divzero="N/A">Avg.</average>
 ......</column>
 ...</row>
 ...<sum color="silver">Total</sum>
 </row>

Sorry, I don't yet have a wiki-tized example result. (Dots to prevent TabMunging.)

Attribute and Tag Descriptions (Not all shown in example)

Also, the location of the titles probably need a bunch of position option tags because there are various ways they can potentially be placed. Paper-based options also need to be addressed (no-page-span, keep-with-group, etc.)

Tags for statistics such as median, standard-deviation, etc. could also be included.

"Field" is used to refer to input table columns to avoid confusion with report "columns".

For now, the input table/sheet is assumed to be pre-sorted.

Actually, multi-nestedness is often a design smell in this day and age as click-able interactive "drill-down" web interfaces can be built rather than try to squeeze all combinations onto a single page. However, the boss/client/user sometimes wants things a certain way and it's not our job to stop them, beyond advice.

--top

This seems like a fine pursuit. I'm interested in developing something similar for user-configurable hovertext in an OCU. Hooking the RDL into the DataModel will probably require greater work, as will numeric formatting and measurement conversions (e.g. Celcius to Fahrenheit). -- GreenHat

But, ReportsSmell -- BlackHat

I don't believe so, but I'll take up my objections on that page.


See Also ReportDefinitionLanguage


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