REPCOM: A Customisable Report Generator Component System Using XML-Driven, Component-Based Development Approach

It is undeniable that report generation is one of the most important tasks in many companies regardless of the size of the company. A good report generation mechanism can increase a company’s productivity in terms of effort and time. This is more obvious in some startup companies, which normally use some in-house report generators. Application development could be complex and thus software developers might require substantial efforts in maintaining application program code. Nevertheless, most of the report generators use a different kind of format to store the report model. An application is no longer considered an enterprise-level product if XML is not being used elsewhere. This paper introduces a XML-driven and Component-based development approach to report generation with the purpose of promoting portability, flexibility and genericity. In this approach, report layout is specified using a user-defined XML elements together with queries that retrieve data from different databases. A report is output as a HTML document, which can be viewed using an Internet browser. This paper presents the approach using an example and discusses the usage of the XML-driven report schema and how the proposed reusable report engine works to output an HTML report format. In addition, the tool is implemented to support heterogeneous database models. Key-words: Report model, Report schema, Report generator, XML, Component-based development, HTML report format