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Reporting through Style sheets (XSLTs)
Hi All,
Using Sifter on a project I found that all the users liked it and got on with using it. However all the managers disliked it. Mainly because it didn't come with Excel reports and other stuff that allows them to talk about issue without have to actually log in and look at the screen ;-) I can say that, as I am one of these managers ;-)
As Sifters reporting (i.e. selection capabilities) need a bit of thought, it was not readily accepted and did not provide the 'can I have this report on my desk every Monday morning' kind of interactions.
To overcome this we used the following approach:
1) Export the data of our account to a local file.
This can be done manually or automated. We automated it through "wget" (google it)
2) Create and run an XML stylesheet (XSLT) over the extracted data
In our case this creates a html page but you can create CSV's etc.
3) E-mail this output to the people who need to know about it.
4) Schedule as a daily task
This simple setup allowed us to have the tailored reports we need.
Feel free to copy ;-)
Here is the idea Garrett:
- Rather than doing all sorts of API stuff, you could allow people run XSLT's and run them against their data on request or as schedule.
- Provide a couple of samples (I'm happy to contribute ours) as standard reports,
- Allow your Sifters users to upload custom XSLTs which empowers them to change the reports as they need (logos are but a link).
- Hosting the XSL on your site would allow to report to be real time.
- Downside: people might write inefficient XSLTs ;-)
- If the Sifter exported data XML changes, who knows what the results are.
Ok, hope this helps and/or provides some input to continue to help make Sifter a better tool
Tom
Using Sifter on a project I found that all the users liked it and got on with using it. However all the managers disliked it. Mainly because it didn't come with Excel reports and other stuff that allows them to talk about issue without have to actually log in and look at the screen ;-) I can say that, as I am one of these managers ;-)
As Sifters reporting (i.e. selection capabilities) need a bit of thought, it was not readily accepted and did not provide the 'can I have this report on my desk every Monday morning' kind of interactions.
To overcome this we used the following approach:
1) Export the data of our account to a local file.
This can be done manually or automated. We automated it through "wget" (google it)
2) Create and run an XML stylesheet (XSLT) over the extracted data
In our case this creates a html page but you can create CSV's etc.
3) E-mail this output to the people who need to know about it.
4) Schedule as a daily task
This simple setup allowed us to have the tailored reports we need.
Feel free to copy ;-)
Here is the idea Garrett:
- Rather than doing all sorts of API stuff, you could allow people run XSLT's and run them against their data on request or as schedule.
- Provide a couple of samples (I'm happy to contribute ours) as standard reports,
- Allow your Sifters users to upload custom XSLTs which empowers them to change the reports as they need (logos are but a link).
- Hosting the XSL on your site would allow to report to be real time.
- Downside: people might write inefficient XSLTs ;-)
- If the Sifter exported data XML changes, who knows what the results are.
Ok, hope this helps and/or provides some input to continue to help make Sifter a better tool
Tom
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Inappropriate?Thanks for sharing this. It's definitely a creative approach to reporting. Long-term, it's much more likely that we'll create a standard set of reports, and if people want something more robust, they'll be able to use the API for that. (Once it's in place.)
If possible, I'd be really interested to see the generated reports and get a feel for the types of information and summaries that you wanted. It would be really useful once we begin adding reporting to Sifter.
Thanks again.
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Inappropriate?I think all Sifter would need to do would be to offer it's data in XML. Then each client could use it as a data source within a custom XSLT file, input to a reporting system, or whatever they want.
I'm thinking the API would deliver data via XML so I wouldn't be surprised if your plans for the API would accommodate the request.
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