Inetseft's StyleReport Pro is the bane of my life at the moment. We need to point our reports at different data sources and even different servers under certain circumstances. StyleReport offers no way of soft-coding these values, so the suggestion is that we have a separate instance of each report definition for each combination of server and data source that we might want to use. Yuck.
But... the report definitions are stored as XML files. Editable XML files. Mwahahahahaha!
Now, StyleReport insists that these report definitions live in the file system. This breaks our J2EE application to a certain extent, because J2EE does not guarantee the availability of a file system. In practise, we are OK; we are deploying to Tomcat, which does give you a file system. We need to keep the application's home directory in a configuration file, which is nasty, but which works. Had we needed to deploy to a sterner J2EE server, though, such as WebSphere, we'd have been buggered.
I wonder how many supposedly J2EE applications need access to the filesystem? Quite a few, I'll be bound. So, does this mean that IBM is being a bit over-strict with WebSphere? Well, no; WebSphere runs on platforms with totally non-standard file systems; the AS/400, no, sorry, iSeries, no, sorry, i5.
Anthony points out that with a bit of work, you can give a J2EE application a file system using Commons VFS. Cool stuff.
Posted to Java by Simon Brunning at July 20, 2004 01:05 PMWho is going to pay for this pointless foray. This is a one off project and we are unlikely to use this tool again (unless you really piss me off) so why not be content with a lash up. It doesn’t matter if technically the solution isn’t A+, as long as the information displayed is correct, looks professional and has a reasonable response time.
Posted by: El Presidente on July 20, 2004 01:30 PMNo, but it has to *work*, and currently it doesn't. I'm not sure I'd call that pointless. A foray, perhaps, but not pointless.
Anyway, Paul, it sounds like you are looking for slap-dash rather than over engineered here. So that's what you'll get. ;-)
As for looking professional, confidence is not high. The so-called WYSIWYG design view doesn't look exactly the same as the preview, which looks different again when printed. Which of these will the PDF output look like, if any? Your guess is as good as mine.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on July 20, 2004 01:39 PMDo you need special equipment for pointless forays? Blunt spears, jungle boots with no tread, mosquito-nets with holes, and such?
Posted by: Tracey on July 20, 2004 01:50 PMGetting the reports to work off other servers is just an extension of the code I already did to make it switch between a/b databases :-)
Cmon' dude, think outside the box ;-)
Posted by: Mark Matthews on July 20, 2004 02:48 PMIs this the code that selects different reports, or is there something else?
Either way, I'm not too happy making changes to code the unit tests for which only has a coverage of 74%. ;-)
Posted by: Simon Brunning on July 20, 2004 03:03 PMSimon's happy working outside the box, let's get him to spend some time in it
Posted by: El Presidente on July 20, 2004 03:41 PM