Jacopo,
you are making here a very negative review of the Birt integration....as
any component sure there is room for improvement however....
Some positives you did not even notice?
1. can use minilanguage for the retrieval
2. can use ofbiz fieldnames and entity names. (not databasenames)
3. can use OFBiz views.....
4. can fully integrate in the ERP application.
5. has many inbuilt output formats.
6. Incorporates the warehouse entities.
Created/extended the datawarehouse which is essential for ordereporting.
We have very big customers where using order reports directly on the
OFBiz database was not possible.
This warehouse function is essential for large customers
I very strongly think about keeping this in the framework.
BI component I agree, can go....
Regards,
Hans
On 03/20/2012 06:47 PM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
L) framework/birt (and related dependencies/reports spread around): move to
"Extras"
M) framework/bi (and related dependencies - ecas/business rules and data - spread
around): move to "Extras"
This is an area where Hans and I are in disagreement and we didn't get much
feedback from others.
So I would like to explain here why I think we should move the Birt component
and the Birt reports out of the framework and consider them as optional tools.
There are currently 18 reports in the applications implemented with Birt; but
they really seem experiments rather than something really usable; to give you
some examples:
* in most of them there is this code like this:
userLogin = null;
try {
userLogin =
delegator.findByPrimaryKey("UserLogin",UtilMisc.toMap("userLoginId","admin"));
} catch(e) {
Debug.logError(e,"");
}
* all the retrieval logic (scripts) is inlined with layout definition and this
is something we try to avoid in all the existing screens
* entity list iterators are not properly closed
* some of the widget based financial reports have been converted to Birt: their
layout is still very simple and comparable to the widget based versions
available before Birt; so the conversion to Birt added a dependencies on this
component without adding real value (the rptdesign files mix together data
preparation scripts and ui definitions and in order to maintain them you have
to use the Birt designer); also some of them are now broken: Income Stetements,
Balance Sheet etc... This is probably caused by the recent refactoring of
JSR-223 but the original widget based PDF are still there and are working
fine...
* building a report with this Birt integration still requires a lot of
development work (similar to the one required to create a screen); but then the
code in the rptdesign is very difficult to maintain without the editor
My questions are:
* do you really think that this way of integrating rptdesign reports is the
answer to fill the gap of a good reporting tool in OFBiz? Are you actually
using this integration for your reports?
* do we all agree to make this Birt integration the best practice mechanism for
all OFBiz reports?
* do you really think that we should replace all the existing widget generated
reports and FOP reports with rptdesign reports built using the existing Birt
integration under the framework?
If any of your answers will be "no" then in my opinion it would be much better
to:
1) make Birt integration an optional component, downloaded separately
2) move the existing rptdesign reports out of the applications and keep them in
the external Birt component
3) at this point users will have the option to use the Birt component or not,
but the ootb code will be clean and without dependencies on it; most of all, we
will not deliver reports that looks similar (ugly) but they are implemented
randomly with Birt or Widgets
4) start evaluating, as a community, what should be the best practices for ootb
reports: what is the tool we want, what are the minimal requirements etc... and
then work together to get it in place and then migrate all existing reports to
it in order to have a consistent system; if the community will not be able to
reach a consensus on this, then we should leave the decision about the
reporting tool to use to the end user
I think that the Birt integration is a nice optional component, and I see that
there may be interested parties, but in its current status it is not something
ready for becoming the primary reporting tool for the ootb applications.
Jacopo
